Brian Freeman - In the Dark aka The Watcher

Clark thought he would take more satisfaction in Finn’s pain, but he didn’t. He was as lifeless as the huge piece of driftwood where Finn sat.

Thirty feet away, sweeping waves broke across a black mirror of surf and slid almost to Clark’s boots. Foam flew up in a white curtain that was as tall as he was. When the water receded across the slick sand, he saw glints of quartz. If he looked hard enough, he could see Mary here as a young girl, her feet slapping through the pools and streams. He could watch the summer sun as it kissed her hair. Hear her squeals of delight. Feel the strength of her damp arms as she hugged him.

“No, Daddy,” she whispered to him again. Urgently.

Clark forced her ghost away. There were some things a child didn’t understand. There were some things a father has to do. I’m sorry, baby .

He clutched the bat with both hands and held it the way a baseball player would, with tight, thick fingers on the grainy wood. Finn’s lips formed the word No , but nothing came out of his chest. Clark unleashed the bat in a fierce arc and whipped it into the meat of Finn’s shoulder. Bones cracked. Muscle tore. Finn’s body rose off the sand and landed in a sprawl four feet away. He curled his limbs together like a baby. His eyes were closed. He wailed.

Clark still felt nothing. He was impervious. Dead.

He retrieved Finn and propped him up again. The man’s collarbone jutted out from his neck like a chicken bone snapped in half. Finn’s skin was white.

“Stop,” he begged Clark. “Please stop. I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t deserve to live.”

“I know.”

Clark squatted down inches from Finn’s face. “You took away my whole life. Everything I am, everything I’ve done, it was all for that little girl. When you killed her, I died. Understand? I’m dead right now because of what you did. And what was she to you? Tell me, what right did you have to be a part of her life?”

Mucus dripped out of Finn’s nose. His lips trembled. “I never meant for anything to happen. I’m so sorry she died. I only wanted to talk to her. I never touched her.”

“You stood outside my little girl’s window,” Clark said. “Did you see her naked?”

Finn was silent.

“Answer me.”

“Yes.”

“Did you take pictures of her?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

Finn shut his mouth again.

“ Goddamn it, what else? Did you jerk off? Is that what you did while staring at my little girl?”

“Yes. Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry, yes.”

Clark stood up again with terrible purpose.

“ No, no, no ,” Finn screamed, but it was too late. Clark swung again, connecting with the soft side of Finn’s knee, hearing it pop as the femur and tibia tore apart. Finn held on to his leg as if he could make the pain stop by covering it up. The sounds from his throat were guttural, like an animal’s. He writhed on the ground. Clark took a heavy breath and walked away, letting the rain and wind pour over him. He wandered into the surf and let the waves splash around his legs, so fierce that they almost toppled him. God was definitely angry now. The lightning was a white strobe light, flashing in his face, knifing across half the sky.

Finn shouted. “Kill me! For God’s sake, just kill me .”

Clark heard Mary again, as if she were right there, tugging at his arm, pleading for attention. “No, Daddy, no.”

I’m sorry, baby . No mercy.

Except now the merciful thing would be to end it. There was that time when his truck had sideswiped a huge buck, and he found it in the deep weeds on the shoulder of the highway, twitching, in agony, dying slowly. He couldn’t drive away and leave it there. Donna was in the truck, and he made her stay inside and not watch. Then he retrieved a rifle from the tailgate and shot the deer in the brain.

An act of mercy.

Clark marched out of the surf. He came up behind Finn, not in front. Finn felt him there but didn’t try to turn around. Clark could see the man’s chest heaving in and out. The bald pate of Finn’s skull was like a melon balanced on the tree trunk. Clark knew it would take one swing of the bat to end it. To end both their lives. One millisecond of pain and light to put Finn, Mary, and himself out of their shared agony.

“Just do it,” Finn shouted.

Clark wrapped his fingers around the wet grip of the bat. His eyes found a misshapen mole on the back of Finn’s head and focused on it. His target. His sweet spot. He wound up and prepared to swing.

The Wisconsin Point was a twin sister to the Minnesota Point, separating Lake Superior from Allouez Bay with a needle of land that suffered the pummeling of waves and gales. Only an inlet of open water not even a thousand feet across separated the two splinters of beach. Unlike its Minnesota sibling, where Stride and Serena lived, the Wisconsin Point was largely undeveloped parkland, so narrow in most places that there was no room to sink a foundation. The only road leading out to the Point was a country lane called Moccasin Mike at the southeastern edge of Superior.

Stride shot through the storm on Moccasin Mike at seventy miles an hour. His windshield wipers sluiced aside the hammering rain. The road was arrow straight, but it was a roller coaster of shallow hills and dips. He didn’t see the worst of the water-filled depressions in the road until the truck was airborne and he and Maggie rose out of their seats. His breath expelled as he landed back down in moving water with a sharp jolt in his back. The truck groaned through the flooded valley and threatened to stall and float, but then the tires chewed back onto solid ground and roared up the opposite slope, cascading spray behind them.

At high speed, the truck gobbled up the two-mile stretch of highway, and Stride nearly missed the left turn to the Point. He braked hard and overcorrected, sending the rear of the Expedition into a fishtail, and then he accelerated again onto the broken asphalt. The truck lurched through a moonscape of potholes. Evergreens leaned in from the shoulders of the road, and he sheared off branches as he drove. His high beams stabbed the darkness, but all he could see was silver rain and black forest, until suddenly the truck burst free from the wilderness onto the slim peninsula and the bay opened up on his left. A roar of wind rattled the truck and threatened to spill it onto its side.

He slowed down. The thunder was a tin can banging in their ears.

“I don’t like this storm,” Stride said. “The lightning is right on top of us.”

They rocked along the uneven road for half a mile, and then Stride caught a reflection of metal in his headlights. A 1990s-era pickup truck was parked in the long grass on the right-hand shoulder by the slope that led to the lakeside beach. Clark’s truck.

He stopped the Expedition askew on the Point road. He and Maggie piled out of both sides. Maggie ran to Clark’s truck and pressed her face against the window.

“It’s empty,” she called. “They must be on the beach.”

“Call for backup.”

Stride unholstered his Glock. Maggie grabbed her phone and shouted instructions.

A muddy path only a foot wide wound between the long grass and sagging birch trees to the top of the slope. The wet ground sucked at Stride’s boots, and he slipped as he climbed, falling to his knees and nearly losing his gun. He had to sink his free hand in the dirt to push himself up. Maggie followed behind him, swearing as her heels got trapped. She kicked them off, leaving herself in bare feet.

They reached the crown of the hill, where the expanse of beach and lake opened up below them. Superior was a living thing, violent and huge, invading the puny finger of sand. Around them, the trees yawned and spun. Lightning popped in their eyes, and the circling beam of the Superior lighthouse flashed through the darkness out on the water.