Fairlane Road Read online

  Fairlane Road

  Cody Lakin

  © Copyright Cody Lakin 2017

  Published by Black Rose Writing

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  © 2017 by Cody Lakin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  First digital version

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61296-914-5

  PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  Print edition produced in the United States of America

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Nika, my Nika-girl, who I was lucky enough to have spent the whole first part of my life with. A dog’s life is always too short for those who get to love them while they’re here, and I’ll never forget how special you made the years you were here for, girl.

  And a special thanks to my close friends and family. I may never have the right words in return for the support and love and meaning you give me.

  “Shady Kyle-dortha; sunnier Kyle-na-no,

  Where many hundred squirrels are as happy

  As though they had been hidden by green boughs

  Where old age cannot find them; Pairc-na-lee,

  Where hazel and ash and privet blind the paths:

  Dim Pair-na-carraig, where the wild bees fling

  Their sudden fragrances on the green air;

  Dim Pair-na-tarav, where enchanted eyes

  Have seen immortal, mild, proud shadows walk.”

  ~William Butler Yeats

  “I sense strongly that this world is a thin place indeed,

  simply a veil over a brighter and more amazing truth.” ~Stephen King

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Quotes

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: A Monster like Charlie Knox

  Chapter 2: Vanished

  Chapter 3: So Faintly You Came Tapping

  Chapter 4: Fairytales

  Chapter 5: Those Little Details

  Chapter 6: The Higher World

  Chapter 7: See, and Despair

  Chapter 8: Nightmares

  Chapter 9: A Messiah

  Chapter 10: Free

  BRW Info

  Prologue

  “Mr. Forgael?”

  “Yes, Jezebel?”

  “What’s really down Fairlane Road?”

  She had asked him that when she had been eight years old and still new to the small town of Lamplight. Her eight-year-old mind had been certain that Old Mr. Forgael knew what was down the old road behind town that all the kids liked talking about. But Mr. Forgael, after a long pause, had only winked at her, and then continued reading his book.

  Jezebel thought about that now as she set out on Forest Street from her house. She was thirteen now, and although she had always been quiet and not given to confidence, she had decided that she was old enough now to face her fears. She had been a child, she told herself, when her family had moved to Forest Street on the edge of town, just a couple minute’s walk from Fairlane Road. She wasn’t a child anymore.

  But as she walked down Forest Street, breathing slowly, the cold hands of apprehension tightened around her. Jezebel had heard stories of the popular high-school football players, who in her mind were as brave as people came—excepting her father of course—and how even they had become too afraid to do any more than set one foot on the road’s rough pavement. But she gripped her hands into fists at her sides and pressed on, telling herself what she always did when she felt fear: that the only real monsters existed in stories, in movies or books. The real world was only as scary as you decided to make it for yourself. Her father had said something like that once, and he was usually right about things.

  As she walked, she thought about Old Mr. Forgael and the conversation she’d had with him when she had been eight years old. It had been one of the first times she had spoken to him on her own, without her dad around.

  “Ah, Jezebel Jean,” he had said from his front porch. “Anyone ever tell you you’ve got the most gorgeous eyes of every girl in this town?”

  She had smiled and blushed and shook her head.

  “Well it’s true, sweetheart. Prettiest eyes I’ve seen in my whole life.”

  Jezebel smiled now at the memory of the old man’s kindness. Ever since then, she had never seen him unhappy or unkind. Visiting him always meant smiling.

  And at thirteen she had grown accustomed to people’s reactions to her eyes. The disbelief, the questions. (“Are they normally like that, dear?”) There had even been an article published in the local newspaper—insubstantial though the small press was—when she was born, and it was framed in the hallway of her house: Girl Born with Purple Eyes. She thought it was funny, though, because there had been an up-close photo of her three-month-old face beside the article, but the newspaper was printed in black-and-white.

  The sun was filtered in thin rays through the trees above her, and it was cool in the shade. She kept her eyes trained on the scattered and fragmented shadows of the branches and leaves cast onto the street.

  As she came to another bend in the road, presenting her with the final homes which made up the lonely neighborhood, including Edgar Forgael’s house, she focused her thoughts as strongly as she could on that conversation with Old Mr. Forgael, still so vivid in her memories. She remembered the peculiar grin that had dawned on his features at mention of Fairlane Road.

  “Ah, you wanta know about that place, do you?” he had said in his distinctly friendly voice. “Funny how I thought you might, one of these days, my dear.”

  It was surrounded by local legend, but it was still just a road, wasn’t it? Just like any other. She told herself this as she walked. And at age thirteen, she had never been more scared of anything in her life.

  It was in this way, her veins pulsing with uncertainty, her skin tight with fear, her heart cold, that Jezebel Jean came to Fairlane Road. Its sign was crooked and slightly bent on one end, and there was nothing but its name to set it apart from any other forest road. It began there, at the edges of the small town of Lamplight, and curved inconspicuously into the tunnels of trees and reached far beyond local knowledge where its expanses inspired stories and rumors with the flavors of folk- and fairytales. Jezebel stood at its beginning, clutching the straps of her backpack with white knuckles and sweaty palms. All the world had gone quiet save for her quivering breaths and rapid, heavy heartbeat.

  She had come here in the middle of the day, rather than sneaking out at night, because she thought nothing could be scary in the day. That was why scary movies seemed to always have the scary parts take place at night. When you could see everything clearly in the daylight, what could be scary about it? At night, your eyes and your mind could play tricks on you. And yet, as she stared at the weathered old sign, at the roa
d’s rough pavement, she felt an involuntary trembling take hold of her legs, and her breaths became uneven.

  There are no monsters in this world, she thought. Not in real life. There’s nothing that can harm me. She told herself these things—things she knew to be true—but she turned her head to the right where the road stretched into the forest, she saw how it darkened under the shelter of trees, how she could only see so far down it, and the fear she felt was almost overwhelming, almost enough to topple her precarious courage and cause her to go running home. But this fear was countered by youthful curiosity stored over several years, and Jezebel knew too well, even at her young age, that if she turned back now, she would be just as curious and just as afraid as before, and would someday be drawn back here. So, she thought, why not now? If not now, when?

  She took a deep breath, stepped onto the asphalt, and began walking down Fairlane Road, all the while pressing herself onward with the self-assurance that there was nothing that could hurt her, there was no evil in real life, and there were no real monsters in this world.

  And nothing was ever the same.

  Chapter 1:

  A Monster like Charlie Knox

  -Eight Years Later-

  “How’s it coming?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Simms. How’s he doing in there?” asked the police chief as he came and stood beside Detective James Goode on the other side of the two-way mirror.

  In the interrogation room—the box, as they called it—were two individuals. Detective Aaron Simms—Goode’s partner—paced in front of the room’s single table, and at the table, in handcuffs, sat a man named Charles Knox. The chief and Detective Goode watched the interrogation with their arms crossed at their chests.

  “He’ll get it,” said Detective Goode. “Not like he needs to—we’ve got this son of a bitch either way—but you know how it goes.”

  The chief nodded, his brow furrowed and his forehead lined with thick wrinkles. “How long has he been in there?”

  “About ten, maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “And Knox ain’t confessed yet?”

  “Hasn’t said anything useful. The freak just keeps asking all these weird questions.”

  Goode rubbed his chin and shook his head. He had just come out of the room himself, having tried to assist his partner, but it had been useless. Now he was resigned to merely watching, leaving the confession in the hands of Simms, who was more gifted with handling interrogations.

  Charles Knox, whoever he was, appeared almost giddy to be sitting there under the ominous fluorescent lights, his black hair a sharp and tangled mess yet still noticeably blasted back, his eyes sunken and shadowed, but held wide open so they looked almost round. Just looking at Knox made James Goode uncomfortable. He didn’t envy his partner and his interrogation skills at all, having to be in the room with him.

  The chief felt the same way about Knox. “And you picked this guy up not far from where he did it?”

  “Yep. The two kids on Forest Street. Old woman said she saw the whole thing happen just outside her house. We picked this guy up on Fairlane Road. Even put his goddamn hands in the air before Aaron and I were out of the car.”

  “Christ.”

  Neither of them verbally acknowledged it to the other, but the fiery look in Knox’s eyes seemed to say it all. If there had been any question as to whether or not he had been the one who did it, that look would have given him away.

  Behind the two-way mirror, at a pause in Detective Simms’s calm questioning, Knox finally spoke again. “Don’t you know who I am, Detective?” His voice was melodic, more like a quiet, calculated song than mere spoken words. His dark eyes gleamed at Simms under the white lights. “Don’t you want to know?”

  Simms ceased his idle pacing and stared Knox in the eyes, a casual, unimpressed smirk on his lips. “Well we already know who you are, Charlie. You told us.”

  “I told you my name, yes,” Charlie Knox grinned. “I’m surprised you haven’t made the connection.”

  “All right, I’ll bite. What’s the big deal, Charlie?”

  “My family. You ought to know their names, Detective.” Knox’s eyes were stricken wide with blistering excitement. “After all, the detectives who brought them down almost eight years ago were from here.” He chuckled when Detective Simms straightened up, his own eyes suddenly wide. “That’s right, Detective. Everyone’s heard the stories. My family’s famous.”

  From the other side of the two-way mirror, the police chief stepped back and threw a hand up to his bald head as his jaw dropped. “Fuck. Jesus fucking Christ. I can’t believe we missed it.” His mouth slowly contorted into a strange smile. “You have any idea what this means, Detective?”

  Detective Goode swallowed hard and forced himself to nod. He’d heard stories about the Knox family, but in his mind—as in the minds of all in town—it was practically a legend, a story told around the station and at bars in hushed tones, and it hardly seemed real. When Charlie Knox had told him his name, it hadn’t even occurred to Goode or Simms to make the connection that this was the son of Thomas and Susan Knox. This was the son of those occult psychopaths.

  Detective Simms exited the interrogation room and approached the chief and Goode. His forehead shone with sweat. “You guys hear all this?”

  Both Goode and the chief nodded, and stared at Charlie Knox in the room. He sat with handcuffed hands and something like amusement gleaming in his eyes.

  “Keep it under wraps,” the chief said, speaking in a low voice. “You two got it? Not until we know anything for sure.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” Simms asked, coming to stand beside them so he could examine Knox through the two-way mirror.

  “Just for now,” said the chief, stepping away and heading for his office. “We don’t want the rest of town to hear about this just yet. It’s bad enough what the fucker did. Got it?”

  Both detectives nodded. Their eyes had never left Charlie Knox.

  * * *

  Following the murder of two teenage boys the day before, the small town of Lamplight—the population of which barely exceeded one thousand—had been quiet, and it still was quiet today. Tragedy was a gracious rarity to the town. Most of the citizens knew only that two boys had been murdered. They had no idea that there was a dangerous psychopath in their midst, which was just as well—even if he was in custody at the police station—because it was best that the citizens felt safe. It allowed them the emotional space for them to comprehend the murders, and grieve if they needed to.

  A few miles from downtown, out on the forested edge of Lamplight, sixty-four-year-old Andrew Jean sat on his little house’s front porch, smoking a cigarette and thinking about his daughter Jezebel, who was, as usual these days, out wandering someplace in the woods. Andrew Jean was heedless of the town’s social media, now filled up with expressions of sorrow and condolences for the families of the two dead boys, but his mind was in the same vein nonetheless.

  There had been three murders in Lamplight in his life, and those had been the work of the Knox family. Nothing as terrible as yesterday had happened in this quiet town since then, and that brought frightening questions to Andrew’s mind.

  Andrew’s house was almost always shaded by the tunnel of trees which made up Forest Street, and that meant that even on days like this, when it was suffocatingly hot in the sun, it wasn’t too hot for Andrew to sit out on his porch with a drink and a cigarette or two. He felt relaxed—retirement, for him, was always relaxing—but his mind was still restless and uneasy.

  Should’ve told Jessie not to go out today, he thought, picturing her hiking alone out in the woods. But he knew she wouldn’t have listened, as usual.

&
nbsp; A sticker-covered pickup truck grumbled by on the street, and Tyler Tracy and his teenage son Arnie waved halfheartedly, prompting Andrew to wave back at them though the brief smile to cross his face was entirely artificial and the thought to cross his mind was confederate-flag flying fucks. The Tracy family had been a troublesome bunch since they had moved onto Forest Street, and there were so many reasons why Andrew was annoyed by them—like the son Arnie’s arrest last year for threatening someone, as well as the family’s numerous other visits by the police for a plethora of reasons—but it was twenty-two-year-old Arnie Tracy’s incessant hitting on Jezebel that irked Andrew Jean more than anything. He shook his head and his blood ran hot at the thought of that desperate kid’s desires for Jezebel.

  Andrew had spent his adolescent years living in the city, and although he had grown a thick skin after having lived most of his life as a detective in this quiet county, the nature of some of the hillbilly people here would always bother him, especially when they lived close enough to make themselves a consistent presence in his life.

  He took a long drag from his cigarette, which was now only half a cigarette, and leaned back in his chair.

  A few minutes later, a silver four-door car pulled into his driveway. The glint on the windshield kept him from seeing who the driver was until he stepped out, and Andrew recognized the man immediately, dressed in a casual suit, blond hair shiny with gel.

  “Detective James Goode,” said Andrew.

  “How’s it going, Mr. Jean?”

  Andrew stood up and met the young man halfway to the porch to shake his hand. “It’s been awhile since I’ve seen you, Jimmy.”

  “Been some time since I’ve had occasion to come.”