Darkheart

The Past: Black & Blue

The funeral was . . . strange. First of all, there wasn't even a body to mourn. There were pieces of it, or so it'd been rumored, but even those pieces had been sent somewhere for investigation. So while there was a coffin for symbolic purposes, there was nobody in it. Secondly, half the people there didn't even believe Ryan was dead and were blatantly discussing conspiracies over the tissue boxes. That's the kind of town it was--entirely ordinary yet rife with conspiracy theorists. Crystal's own mother had gone through a period of ranting about the windmills being introduced a few miles beyond town, concerned about the radiation she'd heard they were emitting, buying into the notion that the government was trying to experiment on them. "We're the perfect lab rats!" the woman had insisted. "Small and far enough away from everyone--nobody would even believe us! And they know it!" Crystal had been a little swayed by her mother's words, but the windmills had gone up, and nothing had changed, and they'd all gone about as normal; if somehow the residents of Port Killdeer were being altered by sinister means, they were ignorant enough about it to carry on.

But the funeral was also weird because Ryan's parents and brother weren't even there. They'd refused to come, sure that it was a hoax of some kind. According to Jeremiah (who seemed to know most things, if not everything), they'd hired some private investigator to look into the event.

It was Ryan's grandmother who'd arranged and presided over the funeral.

All the high school students went. They even had a day off of school to attend. There was a closed-casket wake followed by a service and, presumably, a burial, though no one went to that but whatever family and close friends wished to. Crystal was neither of those. In fact, she hadn't even known Ryan except in passing, as one of those people she'd always known of but never actually known. She wouldn't have gone to the funeral except that it was just what they all did. It was a small town; not going would've been weirder than going, even for people that didn't know Ryan. Jeremiah had assured her of that. And Crystal figured if he were going, she might as well, too. They could make a thing of it, hang out afterward, maybe get some of that project done, the one they'd been assigned in biology.

The chapel was absolutely packed with people wearing black. It was so crowded that mourners spilled into the hall and into outer rooms, taking over pretty much the entire funeral parlor, and someone ended up wheeling televisions into the other rooms so people could watch the service without actually being there. At least they'd been prepared for it.

Nobody young ever really died in Port Killdeer. At least, not the way Ryan had--mysteriously. There'd been that one kid that'd had cancer when Crystal was in fourth grade; they'd had fundraisers for her and everything, but she'd died anyway. And then that boy in seventh grade who'd been walking on the railroad tracks with his headphones in about a mile outside of town . . . that'd been sad. But they'd been explained, those deaths. They'd existed in the public and in her own private consciousness as acceptable. Sad, but understandable. Any other deaths concerned grown people who had their own drama, their own health woes, their own age. For the most part, Port Killdeer was predictable to the point of boredom. Over the years, there'd been a few domestic disputes and car accidents and random incidents of teenage chicanery, and there was occasional strife with the resorters in the summer months, but on whole, things were absolutely, perfectly banal.

So Ryan's demise--not just the fact of it but the way of it--was earthshaking. Not a full-on quake, but a low, deep rumbling, as if the very foundations of Port Killdeer were shifting.

The whispers had spread like wildfire after his disappearance. Crystal hadn't been at the epicenter of any of the information; instead, she'd hovered on the fringes of conversations, as do most people who then reconstruct the information they hear. It'd been a bet, or a dare, she'd heard. Or someone said he'd seen some weird animal and gone after it or heard someone scream and wanted to help. But whatever the case was, he'd gone down the resort road, which was strictly off limits. That much seemed true, no matter who told the story. The fact that it'd been the resort road wasn't in and of itself telling; kids surely snuck down there all the time. It wasn't as if Ryan were the first to do it. Still, the fact that he'd disappeared there felt meaningful. Nobody disappeared at the gas station, or at the bakery, or at the elementary school. Nobody disappeared at the beach, even (it wasn't that kind of beach, an ocean beach, where people got sucked out by undertow). No, something felt eerily right that an apparently sinister event had occurred somewhere back in that forbidden area.