Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

After Daddy leaves for Dallas, I ask Mama why Toby has to stay outside, and she tells me that Daddy thinks it is best. I persist, because as always, I’m told nothing.

“Don’t worry so much about this. Your brother is going to be fine, Petey, just fine. Your father is taking care of him.”

I note the oddity of her comment. She speaks as if Toby is sick or injured, rather than being punished for whatever had caused his fight with Duke Manheim. My confusion grows and feeds my frustration, but my mother deflects my questions, tuts them away, smiles at me as if humoring a feeb. After a time, I become convinced she doesn’t know what’s wrong with Toby. I can tell by the confusion in her eyes and the way she smoothes her hair and the way she smiles, which isn’t really a smile at all, and I know that asking her questions is pointless.

My mother accepted my father’s silences with the same gravity she’d accepted every word he’d ever spoken. As a boy, I’d thought she had as many answers as my father, an equal on the plain of adulthood with her husband, but that wasn’t the case at all. She wasn’t a partner quite so much as an appendage, a utensil, an appliance with a good nature and a pleasant face. It wasn’t until my father died that I understood the depth of her dependence on the man. Without my father, she turned to me for answers, looked to me to make her decisions. Should I sell the house, Petey? Should I move in with your Aunt Ruby and Uncle Lou? Isn’t it better if I don’t go to the hospital? My visits always upset Toby so. If you think I should, I will but …

I called Willow House’s emergency number, but went directly to voice mail. Once the tone sounded, I let them know that Toby had slipped out again. I asked that they not involve the authorities, though I know they are bound by law to do so. Leaving my number, I hung up and dig in my pocket for the keys I’d taken from the hook in the garage.

Then I leave the house. In my car, I consider leaving Toby to the professionals at Willow House. All I had to do was call them back and give them the address. There was only one place he could be.

“The machine still works, Petey. It still works.”

It’s Friday, and I’m walking up the dirt drive to my house. The dust is thick and joins the pollen and both fill the air creating a golden filter for the afternoon sun, which hangs, glaring over the roof. The door to my father’s workshop is open, and I see Toby inside. He is holding a small bucket and a brush, and he’s covering the window in the door with black paint. He is concentrating on the task, lining up his brush carefully before touching it to the pane and sweeping it across the glass. He is so absorbed in the task that my arrival at the door surprises him.

He flinches and steps back and then his posture relaxes. “Hey, squirt,” he says, and the familiarity, the normality of the greeting refreshes like a gulp of sweet tea.

“Hey,” I reply. “Whatcha doing?”

“Painting,” he says.

“Painting windows?”

“That’s what it looks like,” he says.

I notice something is missing from my brother’s eyes. They are red and the lids are heavy and a dull cast covers them.

“Why?”

“It’s a project I’m working on with Daddy,” he says. He seems unsure of the words, and he gazes at the concrete floor of the workshop and then back at the black band he has painted on the glass. “It’s a secret.”

“Are you gonna come back inside?” I ask.

“Not for a while,” Toby says. He dips the brush into the bucket and stirs the black paint gravely.

“Why not?” I’m desperate for information, and even though I see my brother pulling into his thoughts, moving away from me as surely as if he were being dragged behind a speeding truck, I persist. “What happened? What did you do?”

“You better go on inside, now,” he says.

I look past him into my father’s shop. The space was always off limits to us unless we had permission from our father to enter it for a tool or a can of oil. It is large, a converted two-car garage. The floor is clean and cleared except for the army cot, which Toby has made up neatly with sheets and a blanket. The workbenches form a large L in the far corner, and they are similarly devoid of clutter. Neatly organized shelves run floor to ceiling on the right just beyond the cot.

Switching tack I ask, “Can I help?”

Like my father, Toby responds as if I’ve said nothing at all. “You better go on inside.”

Then he scrapes his brush along the side of the paint can and presses its bristles to the window. With his customary precision, he coats the glass from frame to frame without getting a speck of paint on the trim.

It is the middle of the night and I can’t sleep. I’m still not used to having the room to myself. Toby’s absence is a hole I fear I’ll be dragged into. I leave my bed and go to the window and stare down on Daddy’s workshop, and the dark building with its black windows makes me think of a haunted house, and I think my brother is the phantom prowling it. Daddy’s truck is parked only a few feet from the door. He’s back from Dallas. I don’t remember having heard him come home.

After I tire of looking at the workshop, I leave the window and then leave my room and wander down the hall to the stairs. Though I’ve made no conscious decision about where I’m going, I creep downstairs and detect a muffled clicking sound that draws me to the kitchen. Daddy sits at the table under the cone of light falling from the hanging brass fixture, bent over a box with a number of colored wires snaking from its side. A brown paper bag rests to his left. Next to this is the slide projector Mama bought at the flea market in Bastrop. She’d never used it so far as I knew, but she’d been very proud of “the deal” she’d found at the time, and I wonder why Daddy has scavenged the device from the hall closet.

He looks up and fixes grim eyes on me. The overhead light casts shadows down his face, and the dark patches beneath his eyes and chin, and the lines around his mouth look like blotches of rot. A stricken quality passes over his face, and he blinks, and I wonder if he recognizes me at all. He puts down his screwdriver and rubs his eyes and I again think he looks as if he hasn’t slept since Mr. Mannheim’s call all those days ago. His hair is greasy and flat and the skin on his face hangs as if the muscles beneath have relinquished their grasp.

“Peter,” he says quietly. He reaches out and lifts the brown paper bag from the tabletop and lowers it to the floor beside his feet. “You shouldn’t be up.”

“Did you have a good trip to Dallas?”

“Fine,” he says dryly.

I think to ask if he’s found anything that will help Toby, but the expression on his face, empty of all but flickers of life, warns me away from the question. So I stand there silently, following the trajectory of the wires poking from the metal box before him, and I look back to the slide projector sitting like a turtle near the edge of the table, and I take in the spools of wire and the cutters and a box with the word rheostat stenciled across its oatmeal-colored cardboard box.

“You should be in bed,” he says.