Allan Leverone: Mr. Midnight

In the vision, his parents were lying in bed, and his father was doing something to his mother; it almost looked as though he was attacking her, hurting her somehow. And she must have been getting hurt, because she was moaning, her head thrashing back and forth on the pillow. It was horrifying, and not just because the young Milo Cain didn’t understand what it meant. What made it all the more frightening was that he had no idea where it had come from.

The disturbing vision had all the qualities of the dream state, the vivid colors and the hyperreality, but it could not be a dream because Milo was not yet asleep. Even five-year-olds know you have to be asleep to dream, and the moment the vision began, Milo opened his eyes wide in mute, helpless terror, mouth agape, waiting for the scene to end.

When the vision did end—thankfully, this first one was short and to the point, even if Milo didn’t understand the point—his head lolled to the side, and he found himself simultaneously comforted and horrified by the sight of the sleeping forms of his parents in the bed across the semidark motel room.

That long-ago night in Massachusetts represented the beginning of the visions for young Milo Cain. The family found a home and remained on the North Shore, and as Milo grew, the visions became more and more pronounced, growing ever darker and more disturbed even as his treatment at the hands of his parents became more and more twisted.

For a short time he tried to describe the horror of the visions to his mother and father, eventually coming to the realization they didn’t believe him, would never believe him, and would not care even if they did believe him.

After that, Milo simply gave up. He stopped telling his parents about the strange scenes exploding into his head, the visions that now populated more and more of his waking hours. And he began to fall behind in school. His teachers assumed he was daydreaming and uninterested when his features slackened and his eyes glazed over and he stared at the blackboard or out the window, not disturbing anyone or causing trouble but clearly not paying attention, either.

He became withdrawn and sullen at home, spending all his time in his room, stretched out on the bed staring at the wall, unwilling to discuss his problem but unable to make it stop. Soon after, neighborhood pets began disappearing, mostly cats and a couple of small dogs, the occasional mutilated small-animal carcass thrown carelessly into the woods along the side of the road.

One morning in midsummer 2001, when Milo Cain was not quite eighteen years old, he walked out of his parents’ Amesbury home and never returned. Over the next decade, Milo wandered throughout New England, traveling as far south as Bridgeport, Connecticut, and as far north as Jonesport, Maine, at times gaining temporary respites from the torture as the visions receded, at other times suffering mightily as they attacked with renewed fervor.

But they never completely disappeared, and Milo found it easiest to survive inside the sprawling Boston metropolitan complex, where he could disappear, losing himself in the crowds of down-on-their-luck vagrants who, like himself, fit in nowhere.

There was another advantage to living in Boston. Milo’s compulsion to do things, bad things, horrible, twisted things, had blossomed as the visions increased in frequency and intensity. His need to injure, to destroy, to tear apart based on the information contained in those visions was often overwhelming, and this compulsion was fed most easily in the city. The atrocities he committed were not invisible in Boston, of course, but they were much easier to get away with in the teeming metropolis than in the wide-open spaces of a small town like Amesbury, where everyone had known him and seen him as a freak.

After years of restless wandering, Milo moved to the city permanently at the age of twenty-two, never staying in one place too long, moving around obsessively. When his compulsions began to attract the attention of the wrong people, he would simply pick up stakes and wander to another neighborhood, from Dorchester to Roxbury to Mattapan to Back Bay, thrilled that by traveling just a few blocks he could begin fresh.

There was the occasional brush with the law; it was almost impossible to be a vagrant, even in a city as large as Boston, and not catch the eye of the authorities every so often. But to Milo’s continuing amazement, most of the suspicion involved his appearance, his dirty clothes and unkempt hair, those superficial things that made the good citizens of Massachusetts uncomfortable.

The things that should have been of interest to the police—the abductions, the torture, now of humans rather than animals—never seemed to find their way back to him, despite the fact he rarely made more than a token attempt at disguising his activities, and despite the fact that the media had begun playing up the horrifying exploits of “Mr. Midnight,” the tag a clever television news reporter had hung on him a few months ago, when a trash bag filled with decaying body parts had been discovered behind a restaurant in Chinatown.

He supposed his visions were largely responsible for his invincibility. Thanks to the images flashing into his head, he was able to select as victims only people who would pose no more than a minor threat to him. The irony of being insulated and protected by the very visions that tortured him day after day and made his life a living hell was not lost on Milo; he appreciated it in the way an entomologist might appreciate being bitten by a particularly poisonous insect: the experience was painful and rewarding at the same time.

All of this ran through Milo Cain’s mind as he leaned against the bleak apartment wall. He savored the clarity of thought that accompanied his brief respites from the visions. The damned images spent so much time bouncing around inside his brain that when they finally subsided, his head felt large and airy, like a penthouse apartment that has been cleared of all furniture.

He considered the long night ahead, stretching dark and empty before him. His skin was beginning to feel tight and hot, and his breathing felt ragged and constricted. His obsessions were beckoning again. It was time to play.

Tonight he would find a streetwalker. Playing with hookers was especially enjoyable. Milo loved taking the hardened, streetwise bitches, with their garish makeup and their superior, sneering attitudes and turning them into helpless victims, begging and pleading for their worthless lives, suspecting but never knowing for certain until the very end what their fate was going to be.

With hookers, the risk of getting caught was minimal. Dealing with pros meant dealing with people who, like himself, spent their days and nights on the fringes of accepted society. Their pimps would miss them, but that would be it. There would likely be no worried husbands or boyfriends to report them missing, no concerned coworkers to alert the authorities when they didn’t report to the office Monday morning.

They would simply vanish.

So that was it, then. He would take a walk tonight and let the visions lead him to the perfect victim. The visions would be there to guide him. They always were.

Thirty years ago

Everett, Massachusetts

The sun had by now descended below the horizon, and the room was enveloped in a gloom Robert thought most appropriate for the occasion. Virginia dozed and Robert sat next to her, holding their children, one in each arm, fighting a sadness that threatened to overwhelm him. What should have been one of the happiest days of his life was turning into one of the most horrifying.

“Dr. Jones” had departed, collecting his fee in cash as previously agreed upon and promising to stop by tomorrow to look in on Virginia. By then the babies would be gone, not that Dr. Jones would care one way or the other. He had been contracted to provide medical services to Virginia Ayers during the delivery, and that was all. The infants were not a part of that contract and thus not Dr. Jones’s concern.