Jeffry Lindsay - Dexter in the Dark

From the very beginning it was an ideal partnership. The new things had self-awareness, and that made manipulating them much easier-and much more rewarding for IT. They killed one another much more readily, too, and IT did not have to wait long at all for a new host-nor to try again to reproduce. IT eagerly drove IT’s host to a killing, and IT waited, longing to feel the strange and wonderful swelling.

But when the feeling came, it simply stirred slowly, tickled IT with a tendril of sensation, and then vanished without blossoming and producing offspring.

IT was puzzled. Why didn’t reproduction work this time? There had to be a reason, and IT was orderly and efficient in IT’s search for the answer. Over many years, as the new things changed and grew, IT experimented. And gradually IT found the conditions that made reproduction work. It took quite a few kills before IT was satisfied that IT had found the answer, but each time IT duplicated the final formula, a new awareness came into being and fled into the world in pain and terror, and IT was satisfied.

The thing worked best when the hosts were off-balance a bit, either from the drinks they had begun to brew or from some kind of trance state. The victim had to know what was coming, and if there was an audience of some kind, their emotions fed into the experience and made it even more powerful.

Then there was fire-fire was a very good way to kill the victims. It seemed to release their essence all at once in a great shrieking jolt of spectacular energy.

And finally, the whole thing worked better with the young ones. The emotions all around were so much stronger, especially in the parents. It was wonderful beyond anything else IT could imagine.

Fire, trance, young victims. A simple formula.

IT began to push the new hosts to create a way to establish these conditions permanently. And the hosts were surprisingly willing to go along with IT.

WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG I ONCE SAW A VARIETY ACT on TV. A man put a bunch of plates on the end of a series of supple rods, and kept them up in the air by whipping the rods around to spin the plates. And if he slowed down or turned his back, even for a moment, one of the plates would wobble and then crash to the ground, followed by all the others in series.

That’s a terrific metaphor for life, isn’t it? We’re all trying to keep our plates spinning in the air, and once you get them up there you can’t take your eyes off them and you have to keep chugging along without rest. Except that in life, somebody keeps adding more plates, hiding the rods, and changing the law of gravity when you’re not looking. And so every time you think you have all your plates spinning nicely, suddenly you hear a hideous clattering crash behind you and a whole row of plates you didn’t even know you had begins to hit the ground.

Here I had stupidly assumed that the tragic death of Manny Borque had given me one less plate to worry about, since I could now proceed to cater the wedding as it should be done, with $65 worth of cold cuts and a cooler full of soda. I could concentrate on the very real and important problem of putting me back together again. And so thinking all was quiet on the home front, I turned my back for just a moment and was rewarded with a spectacular crash behind me.

The metaphorical plate in question shattered when I came into Rita’s house after work. It was so quiet that I assumed no one was home, but a quick glance inside showed something far more disturbing. Cody and Astor sat motionless on the couch, and Rita was standing behind them with a look on her face that could easily turn fresh milk into yogurt.

“Dexter,” she said, and the tromp of doom was in her voice, “we need to talk.”

“Of course,” I said, and as I reeled from her expression, even the mere thought of a lighthearted response shriveled into dust and blew away in the icy air.

“These children,” Rita said. Apparently that was the entire thought, because she just glared and said no more.

But of course, I knew which children she meant, so I nodded encouragingly. “Yes,” I said.

“Ooh,” she said.

Well, if it was taking Rita this long to form a complete sentence, it was easy to see why the house had been so quiet when I walked in. Clearly the lost art of conversation was going to need a little boost from Diplomatic Dexter if we were ever going to get more than seven words out in time for dinner. So I plunged straight in with my well-known courage. “Rita,” I said, “is there some kind of problem?”

“Ooh,” she said again, which was not encouraging.

Well really, there’s only so much you can do with monosyllables, even if you are a gifted conversationalist like me. Since there was clearly no help coming from Rita, I looked at Cody and Astor, who had not moved since I came in. “All right,” I said. “Can you two tell me what’s wrong with your mother?”

They exchanged one of their famous looks, and then turned back to me. “We didn’t mean to,” Astor said. “It was an accident.”

It wasn’t much, but at least it was a complete sentence. “I’m very glad to hear it,” I said. “ What was an accident?”

“We got caught,” Cody said, and Astor poked him with an elbow.

“We didn’t mean to ,” she repeated with emphasis, and Cody turned to look at her before he remembered what they had agreed on; she glared at him and he blinked once before slowly nodding his head at me.

“Accident,” he said.

It was nice to see that the party line was firmly in place behind a united front, but I was still no closer to knowing what we were talking about, and we had been talking about it, more or less, for several minutes-time being a large factor, since the dinner hour was approaching and Dexter does require regular feeding.

“That’s all they’ll say about it,” Rita said. “And it is nowhere near enough. I don’t see how you could possibly tie up the Villegas’ cat by accident.”

“It didn’t die,” Astor said in the tiniest voice I had ever heard her use.

“And what were the hedge clippers for?” Rita demanded.

“We didn’t use them,” Astor said.

“But you were going to, weren’t you?” Rita said.

Two small heads swiveled to face me, and a moment later, Rita’s did, too.

I am sure it was completely unintentional, but a picture was beginning to emerge of what had happened, and it was not a peaceful still life. Clearly the youngsters had been attempting an independent study without me. And even worse, I could tell that somehow it had become my problem; the children expected me to bail them out, and Rita was clearly prepared to lock and load and open fire on me. Of course it was unfair; all I had done so far was come home from work. But as I have noticed on more than one occasion, life itself is unfair, and there is no complaint department, so we might as well accept things the way they happen, clean up the mess, and move on.

Which is what I attempted to do, however futile I suspected it would be. “I’m sure there’s a very good explanation,” I said, and Astor brightened immediately and began to nod vigorously.

“It was an accident,” she insisted happily.

“Nobody ties up a cat, tapes it to a workbench, and stands over it with hedge clippers by accident !” Rita said.

To be honest, things were getting a little complicated. On the one hand, I was very pleased to get such a clear picture at last of what the problem was. But on the other hand, we seemed to have strayed into an area that could be somewhat awkward to explain, and I could not help feeling that Rita might be a little bit better off if she remained ignorant of these matters.