Jeff Lindsay - Dexter by Design

This really should not have bothered me. Dexter does what he must and the only reason he does it to the well deserving is because of Harry's training. For all the Dark Passenger cares, it could just as easily be random. The relief would be just as sweet for us. The way I choose is merely the Harry-imposed icy logic of the knife.

But it was possible that Harry's voice was in me deeper than I had ever thought, because the idea that Doncevic might be innocent was sending me into a tailspin. And even before I could get a grip on this nasty uncomfortable sensation, I realized Coulter was staring at me.

“Yes” I said, not at all sure what that meant.

Coulter once again threw a mangled toothpick at the trash can.

He missed again. “So where's the other guy?” he said.

“I don't know” I told him. And I didn't.

But I really wanted to find out.

I HAVE HEARD CO-WORKERS SPEAK OF HAVING 'THE BLAHS', and always thought myself blessed that I lacked the ability to provide a host for anything with such an unattractive name. But the last few hours of my work day could be described in no other way. Dexter of the Bright Knife, Dexter the Duke of Darkness, Dexter the Hard and Sharp and Totally Empty, had the blahs. It was uncomfortable, of course, but due to the very nature of the thing I did not have the energy to do anything about it. I sat at my desk and pushed paperclips around, wishing I could just as easily push the pictures out of my head: Deborah falling; my foot connecting to Doncevic's head; the knife going up; the saw coming down ...

Blah. It was as stupid as it was embarrassing and enervating.

Okay, technically speaking, Doncevic had been sort of innocent.

I had made one lousy little mistake. Big deal. Nobody's perfect. Why should I even pretend to be? Was I really going to imagine that I felt bad about ending an innocent life? Preposterous. And anyway, what is innocent, after all? Doncevic had been playing around with dead bodies, and he had caused millions of dollars in damage to the city budget and the tourist industry. There were plenty of people in Miami who would gladly have killed him just to stop the bleeding.

The only problem was that one of those people was not me.

I was not much, I knew that. I never pretended to have any real humanity, and I certainly didn't tell myself that what I did was all right just because my playmates were cut from the same cloth. In fact, I was fairly certain that the world would be a much better place without me. Mind you, I have never been in a very big hurry to make the world a better place in that regard, either. I wanted to stick around as long as possible, because when you die either everything stops forever, or else Dexter was in for a very warm surprise. Neither option seemed like much of a choice.

So, I had no illusions about my worth to the rest of the world.

I did what I did and didn't ask for any thanks. But always, every time since the very first, I had done it by the rules laid down by Saint Harry, my near-perfect adoptive father. This time I had broken the rules, and for reasons that were not clear to me, that made me feel like I deserved to be caught and punished. And I could not convince myself that this was a healthy feeling.

So I battled the blahs until quitting time and then, without any real increase in energy, I drove over to the hospital again. The rush hour traffic did nothing to cheer me up. Everybody seemed to be just going through the motions without any real, genuine homicidal rage. A woman cut me off and threw half an orange at my windshield, and a man in a van tried to run me off the road, but they seemed to be doing it mechanically, not really putting their hearts into it.

When I got to Deborah's room, Chutsky was asleep in his chair, snoring loud enough to rattle the windows. So I sat for a little while, watching Deborah's eyelids quiver. I thought that was probably a good thing, indicating she was getting her REM sleep and therefore getting better. I wondered what she would think of my little mistake when she woke up. Considering what her attitude had been just before she got stabbed, it didn't seem likely that she would be terribly understanding about even such a minor slip-up. After all, she was as much in the grip of Harry's Shadow as I was, and if she could barely tolerate what I did when it was Harry Approved, she would never go along with something outside his careful limits.

Debs could never know what I had done. Not a big deal, considering I had always hidden everything from her until recently. But it didn't make me feel any better this time, for some reason. After all, I had done this one for her, as much as anything else —the first time I had ever acted out of noble impulses, and it had turned out very badly. My sister made a really poor Dark Passenger.

Debs moved her hand, just a twitch, and her eyes blinked open.

Her lips parted slightly and I was certain she actually focused on me for a moment. I leaned toward her and she watched me, and then her eyelids drifted closed again.

She was slowly getting better, and she was going to make it, I was sure. It might be weeks rather than days, but sooner or later she was going to get up out of that awful steel bed and get to work at being her old self again. And when she did ... what would she do about me?

I didn't know. But I had a very bad feeling that it wouldn't be much fun for either of us; because as I had realized, we were both still living in Harry's shadow, and I was pretty sure I knew what Harry would say.

Harry would say it was wrong, because this was not the way he had designed Dexter's life, as I remembered oh so well.

Harry usually looked very happy when he came in the front door from work. I don't think he ever was truly happy, of course, but he always looked like it, and this was one of my first very important lessons from him: make your face fit the occasion. It may seem like a small and obvious point, but to a fledgling monster still figuring out that he was very different, it was a vital lesson.

I remember sitting in the great banyan tree in our front yard one afternoon because, frankly, that is what the other kids in the neighborhood did, even long after what one might call optimum tree-climbing age. Those trees were a great place to sit, with their wide horizontal branches, and they served as a clubhouse for everyone under the age of eighteen.

So I sat in mine that afternoon, hoping the rest of the neighborhood would mistake me as normal. I was at an age where everything was starting to change, and I had begun to notice that I was changing in a very different way. For one thing, I was not totally consumed with trying to see under Bobbie Gelber's skirt when she climbed up into the tree, and all the other boys were. And for another ...

When the Dark Passenger started whispering wicked thoughts, I realized that it was a presence that had always been there; it just had not spoken until now. But now, when my contemporaries were starting to pass around copies of Hustler, it was sending me dreams of a different kind of illustration, perhaps from Vivisection Monthly. Although the images that came to me were disturbing at first, they started to seem more and more natural, inevitable, desirable, and finally, necessary. But another voice, equally strong, told me this was wrong, crazy, very dangerous. And for the most part the two voices fought to a tie and I did nothing but dream, just like all the human boys my age.

One wonderful night the two whispering armies came together when I realized that the Gelbers” dog, Buddy, was keeping Mom awake with its non-stop barking. This was not a good thing. Mom was dying of some untreatable mysterious thing called a lymphoma, and she needed her sleep. It occurred to me that if I could help Mom sleep, this would be a very good thing, and both voices agreed that this was so —one somewhat reluctantly, of course, but the other, darker one, with an eagerness that made me dizzy.