Dark Crescent

By Dev Jarrett

If you could change the future, would you?

Bud Primrose, assistant coach of a Little League team, gets smacked in the head with a line drive and wakes up in the hospital with a kind of second sight.

If you saw a stranger’s death coming, would you try to save her?

He sees others' deaths hours before they occur. When he uses this strange new ability to save a woman from a brutal murder, he becomes the thwarted next target.

If you had the power, would you use it?

Now he must do everything he can to save himself and the woman he loves from the razor-wielding maniac bent on payback.

If you had to face a killer, could you do it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Permuted
• Release date: Jun 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781618685865

Book preview

1.

It was an accident.

One minute Jerry Bud Primrose was standing outside the third base line, yelling to one of the runners to pay attention, and the next he swam in a limitless dark sea of nothing.

The boys were in the bottom of the ninth, and the score was tied 4-4. Bud was the assistant coach of the Cubs and he knew, with a little luck, they could take this one home. Jonathan was on second base, the bill of his cap creased into a narrow roofpeak and the skin of his nose the pink of freshly peeled sunburn. If the other team’s catcher dropped the ball, Bud wanted Jonathan to steal third.

When Bud finally got the boy’s attention, he raised his hands and began signaling. Right hand earlobe, left hand bill of cap: if possible, steal third.

All around him the sounds of the baseball game swirled like dancers in a summer cotillion, the chatter of the outfielders and the cheering of parents circled in red and yellow harmonies, then a solid wooden smack shouted across the field, and suddenly Bud was in a silent ocean of darkness.

The next minute lasted for hours, months, decades. It finally grew into a stretched, stuttering montage of unclear impressions surrounded by Halloween agony, bright orange and black blooms of pain. White lights shining in white rooms, the sharp scent of disinfectant, anesthesia voices that were low and slow and built from the bones of echoes. The impressions were strung together on the darkness and the darkness was cobbled from pain. His head throbbed and he felt at the base of his skull every pulse of his beating heart.

Then the darkness began to recede, uncovering more and more moments of clarity, until they formed a coherent whole. Thoughts started lumbering heavily through the savannah of his mind like confused elephants. Ponderous ponderings. The bees buzzing in his ears softened to the sterile hum of fluorescent lights and the disinfectant smell that was so strong it was nearly a flavor faded to a smeared scent of ammonia, plastic, and new bandages.

He opened his eyes and saw a wrinkled plain of white linen stretching away from the left side of his face, crumpled against a plastic side rail, and he realized that he was in a hospital bed. The pain was still a molten red web over everything, turning each movement into hot agony.

Something was wrong with his eyes. On the right side of his field of vision, a black spot hovered. A thin crescent of black floated like a photographic negative of the spectral edge of a waning moon.

A face swam out of nowhere. Young, female, with short red hair and dark eyes.

Mr. Primrose, welcome back. I’m Nurse Matthews, but you can call me Kelli. How we doing?

He tried to tell her he was thirsty, but all he managed was a low, hollow whistle. He lifted an arm as heavy as lead and pointed to his throat.

Let me get you some water. The face disappeared, then returned moments later with a dark yellow plastic cup. A bendy straw sprouted from the top of it, and as she moved the cup toward him, she tilted the end of the straw toward his mouth. Her fingernails were bitten close. He closed his lips around the straw and took a long pull, the icy water flowing over the cracked surfaces of his tongue and gums, soothing the sticky, dry flesh. The sudden cold sent a sharp spike of pain into his already thundering head. He closed his eyes and frowned.

Just take it slow, sir. Hang on a moment, and I’ll go get the doctor.

The bright star of brain-freeze slowly dimmed, leaving Bud lying with the weight of the original headache pounding behind his right ear.

He opened his eyes again and tried to focus them beyond the bed. The wall he faced was a nondescript, utilitarian beige, a slice of it blacked out by the strange dark crescent. It looked as if reality puckered and curled in at the edges, bending into the darkness of the crescent. On the wall were electrical outlets of several different colors: red, green, white, and black, and one of the green ones tipped in right at the edge of the dark crescent. From the corner of his eyes he could see the ceiling tiles above him. One had a water stain on it that looked like the brown silhouette of a Dick Tracy villain. He could make out a jawline and a nose, but the rest of it was distorted and misshapen.

What would be the name of that character, he wondered. Chicken Head? The Onion? Beside that tile, a Mylar balloon with a white ribbon curling from its base was pressed against the ceiling. GET WELL SOON! it ordered him in red cursive letters. His eyes traversed his field of vision, chasing the thin black crescent.

He heard the click of the door latch, and another unfamiliar face loomed into view. A thin Asian face, framed with straight, uniformly gray hair.

Mr. Primrose! Hi, I’m Doctor Song. How are you feeling?

Head...hurts, he finally croaked.

I’ll bet it does. He reached out, lifted Bud’s eyelids one by one and shone a light into his face. You got hit with a baseball, just above and behind your right ear. It put a tiny crack in your skull, and there was some swelling, but it looks like you’re going to be all right. At this point, there’s no significant intracranial pressure to worry about, so, other than waiting for the concussion to heal and for the skull to fuse back together on the fault, there’s no other cause for concern. The doctor snapped his fingers near Bud’s right ear. Can you hear that?

Yeah, but my eyes...something’s wrong.

I see they’re still pretty bloodshot. As far as your vision goes, you might have a few irregularities relating to the concussion but that should clear up in a few days. There could be some remaining swelling behind your eyes putting a strain on your vision but I wouldn’t say it’s anything to worry about.

Bud’s head was muzzy. He had a difficult time coming up with a lucid question. How...long was I out?

Two days. The man who came with you to the emergency room said you were his assistant coach and that one of your kids smacked you with a line drive. Any memory of that?

Bud considered. He said that he remembered that Jonathan was on second base, but nothing beyond.

That’s all right. You’re actually lucky. That was a Major League line drive off that Little League bat. If you’d been hit harder, your prognosis could have been much worse. If you’d damaged any blood vessels up there, he tapped his own temple, you could have had a stroke. We’re talking brain damage, or even death. So, all in all, you’re doing pretty well. Other than the head pain and the vision abnormalities, how do you feel?

Just tired, I guess...a little nauseated. Not going dancing tonight, for sure.

Can you sit up?

I’ll try.

The doctor took his arm and helped Bud into a sitting position. When Bud dropped his arm to his side, a dagger of pain slid into the sinews of his neck, stretching from the back of his shoulder to the base of his skull. He winced.

All good? Okay. Got a couple more questions, just to make sure your circuits are still firing, then you can rest.

Okay, Doc.

What’s four times five?

Twenty.

What’s your mother’s maiden name?

Framingham.

What’s the name for those things you wear on your hands in cold weather?

Gloves? Mittens?

Good. Now move your eyes to follow my finger.

Bud followed his finger as it moved in front of his face. It was difficult because the floating black crescent distracted him, but he kept tracking the progress of Doctor Song’s finger.

The doctor held out his hands.

Make two fists, and hold them up on the insides of my hands. When Bud did so, the doctor asked him to push his hands away from each other. Next, he had Bud go in the opposite direction and try to push his hands together.

The doctor finished and Bud closed his eyes again. His head was hurting worse. He heard the doctor’s voice as if from a great distance. He opened his eyes and the black crescent, sharply defined, floated in the middle distance like a stain on reality.

All right. Initially, it looks like you’re at the high end of the scale. That’s enough for now, Mr. Primrose. We’ll have to run some more tests, just to make sure there’s no persistent traumatic brain injury, but some of the diagnosis will simply take time. For now, just relax. You can lie back down. He did as the doctor said. We’re going to run a couple more tests this evening, and after that, we’ll see where we stand. At a guess, I’d say you’ll be home tomorrow, if not the day after. Your nurse will be back in a moment. Relax, let your head heal and you’ll be able to get back out on the diamond with your Little Leaguers in no time.

The doctor left the room and Bud watched the ceiling tiles shift and mutter with fluctuating air currents as the door closed behind him. The balloon on the ceiling pressed itself against one of the tiles, then it ghosted silently into the corner of the room. Bud stared at the beige wall, his head throbbing, and he noticed something odd.

The crescent had changed shape.

Where it had looked like a hook before, now the inside curve had bulged out, making it into a vaguely football-shaped lens. He watched, and saw it widen more. It swelled, its growing edge eating reality as more of the world was pulled into the hole. As it did, the blackness at the center of the shape began to dissipate. He could see the shapes of things beyond the darkness.

Maybe my vision’s starting to clear up, he thought.

The shape continued to grow until it covered most of his field of vision. The shape faded more and more, until it was almost completely transparent. Bud was excited, despite the thunderstorm of headache rolling across his mind, caroming off the walls of his skull. If his vision was clearing, maybe he’d even get to go home early.

The door opened again, and Bud felt the nurse’s hands around his feet, tucking in the blanket. They were efficient without being abrupt, and Bud closed his eyes and sighed his contentment.

Everything all right, Mr. Primrose? he heard her voice near his face again, and he opened his eyes.

The thing before him took away his breath so sharply that for a moment he couldn’t even scream.

The woman’s red hair was folded over itself, a loose flap of torn scalp nodding and bobbing and dripping blood onto her crisp nurse’s whites. A pale swath of skull showed where the scalp was torn away. Half of the girl’s face was shredded, and as Bud watched, her punctured and deflated left eye tipped forward out of its socket in a sudden gush of blood, hanging on her cheek in a knotted nest of nerve and muscle. Bud saw the tendons in her jaw flex, and caught glimpses of her blood-spattered molars beneath the torn flesh of her opened cheek. A fat bubble of blood formed at one of these holes, then burst silently. Beneath her other bloody eye, a curved white shard of orbital bone punctured her cheek, looking like nothing so much as a strange eroded tusk erupting from the side of her face. Blood poured out of both her nostrils, flowing over her ruined mouth and down her chin in a thick, steady stream. A wide, dirty black band crossed her nurse’s uniform, and dark red soaked into it. She opened her mouth, spilling more blood, and a broken tooth oozed over her lower lip like a pat of warm butter on an ear of corn.

You sleep well this evening, Mr. Primrose, the horror said, smiling a friendly, hideous grin. Gore bubbled out of her torn mouth, from her crushed nose, and from her eye sockets.

Bud finally found his breath and he shrieked, clawing the sheets as he struggled backward away from the thing before him. The back of his head slammed against the railing on the far side of the bed, and his mind exploded again into orange and black agony. He screeched, rebounding from the bedrail behind him while at the same time scrambling away from the vision of slaughter in front of him.

He screamed for help, clamping his eyes shut.

Mr. Primrose? What is it?

He heard, distantly, the nurse’s bewildered question, as well as the continued pattering sound of her blood as it hit the floor, then her panicked call for assistance. He continued to scream, and had nearly pushed himself over the far railing of the bed, when several strong sets of hands grabbed him. They forced him back onto the center of the bed and held him tightly. He kept fighting and wriggling, struggling to shift his weight against the grip of his captors.

He heard the nurse tell a doctor what had happened.

Bud felt his eyelids pried open and found himself looking into a bright penlight. When it moved away, he saw Doctor Song’s concerned eyes.

Mr. Primrose. What’s wrong?

Help her, you fucking idiot!

Who?

The nurse! Whatsername! Kelli! What the fuck happened to her?

What are you talking about, Mr. Primrose?

Look at her!

Bud turned his head painfully to one side, to where he’d last heard the nurse’s voice. Doctor Song saw what he was doing and stood back to allow a better view, and the hands of the orderlies holding him loosened their grip without releasing him.

Nurse Kelli stood in the doorway. She was completely whole, except for a blush of fear on her cheeks and a wet glassiness to her eyes that suggested she was near tears. Her mouth was pinched into a frown, and a vertical line of worry was a strange exclamation point between her eyebrows.

No blood and no injury at all showed anywhere on her face or body.

A harsh breath whooshed out of him as relief flooded Bud’s heart.

Oh my God. I’m so sorry. You were covered all over with blood! You were all busted up, but you were talking like...oh, shit. It was so clear, so vivid. Bud turned to Doctor Song, terrified. Oh, shit. What the hell is wrong with me, Doc?

Nurse Kelli backed into the corridor and hurried away, her white sneaker soles squeaking on the polished tile floor. The doctor shook his head.

I’m not sure, Mr. Primrose. A visual hallucination. Could be from a seizure caused by your injury. I’m going to order another scan tonight, just to be sure.

Bud looked into the corridor again. The orderlies were filing out of the room with nervous glances over their shoulders.

He blinked and noticed then that it was back.

On the right side of his vision, the dark crescent floated like the reaper’s scythe blade.

2.

After the visit to the Radiology Department, they gave Bud a vial of some clear fluid, injecting it directly into his IV line. Almost immediately he became woozy, his tongue feeling too fat for his mouth and his eyelids growing heavy. He pushed his eyes open and saw Doctor Song standing over him, scribbling on a metal clipboard and his eyes closed.

He opened them again sometime later and saw that his room lights had been turned off. Cold fluorescent light shone from the corridor through the narrow window in his door. His eyes closed again and the next time he opened them, it was morning, and gray light came into the room around the slitted window blinds.

The black fingernail paring still floated on the right side of his vision. He stuck out his hand and waved it in the spot where the crescent hung, but it seemed opaque. His hand bent oddly into the darkness as it passed the edge. Unnerved, he put his arm down as the door to his room opened.

A burly orderly who looked like he’d be more at home employed as a bouncer at a biker roadhouse than whispering around hospital corridors in scrubs and white crepe-soled sneakers brought in a tray of food, set it on the table, and checked the monitors behind Bud’s left shoulder. He lifted Bud’s wrist in a hand like a vise, ostensibly checking Bud’s pulse. A few moments later, he let the wrist drop back onto the bed. He glowered at Bud as he left the room in silence.

Um...thanks? Bud asked the empty room. He wrestled himself into a sitting position, adjusted the incline of the bed, and pulled the tray table near. When he lifted the shallow lid between the small carton of milk and the juice box of apple juice, he found a cold, scorched pancake alone on the plate.

He looked around the room, trying to ignore the black crescent constantly in the corner of his sight. The room was a semiprivate, but the other bed was empty, its sheets creased and folded with military precision. A set of wide vertical blinds closed out most of the light from the window. A TV set was bolted to a metal shelf that jutted from the wall. Bud heard the subdued sounds of people passing in the corridor outside his door. When he looked at the small window in the door, he saw a female face peering in at him, a curious expression on her face. He made eye contact and the face abruptly disappeared.

Weird.

The room was too quiet. He knew the doctor would be making his morning rounds before long and he expected that the nurses were obligated to check on him now and then, but at that very moment, the complete silence was irritating. Bud picked up the television remote and turned it on, in hopes of distracting himself. He saw a ghost of Regis Philbin through the heavy onscreen snow but the sound was crystal clear. He half listened to the back and forth of the interviews, the sentences interspersed with Regis’s huge guffaw.

While the morning talk show droned in the background, Bud drank the milk and the juice, and made a tentative effort with the pancake. It tasted as unappealing as it looked, so he pushed the plate away.

He relaxed, leaning back on the raised head of the bed. He saw that if he squinted and tilted his head sideways, the black crescent made an umbrella that floated above the head of the fuzzy image of Regis. He tried then to shift it the other way, but that angle made his head hurt more. One talk show gave way to another and he grew bored.

Bud hoped that whatever seizure he’d had last night was a one-time thing. He’d never seen anything so horrible, and he knew he’d scared the hell out of that girl. He looked forward to being able to apologize for sounding so damned crazy.

He reached up and touched the back of his head as gently as he could manage. Even the softest touch felt like a stab. A huge goose-egg humped up the back of his head like a giant skull goiter. It was easily three inches in diameter, its front edge at the very back of his ear. He thought, perversely, about squashing the goose-egg flat, but the nausea that idea caused made him move his hand.

The door opened again, and the man who dropped off the breakfast tray entered again. His face made Bud think of a Hell’s Angel the morning after a wild party. Tough, but pissed and ill.

Hey, Bud said. Will Doctor Song be around soon?

The man said nothing. He picked up the tray and left the room. When he opened the door, a group of three frowning people peered into the room. The door closed behind him, cutting off the view of the corridor rubberneckers.

What the hell is going on?

Gosh, thanks. Asshole.

The blobs of people on the TV screen changed from talk show blobs into game show blobs. Bud let the sound wash over him as he lay on the bed, counting the ceiling tiles. He idly wondered who’d sent the balloon to him. Jim Horne, the head coach? Not likely. Bud couldn’t imagine Jim doing something like that. The kid that beaned him? Bud doubted that, too.

The ribbon on the bottom of the balloon was attached at the other end to a small yellow envelope, the kind that come stuck on little plastic pitchforks in flower arrangements. Nothing was written on the outside of the envelope. More than the anonymity of the envelope, the simple singularity of a get well wish made him curious. He wanted to read the contents of the envelope. He’d have to wait and get Kelli to get it for him later.

The door opened, and Doctor Song came in. He reached down to his belt and peered at a message on his beeper, then turned to Bud.

Mr. Primrose. Good to see you sitting up. How do you feel today? The doctor’s expression looked different this morning. Wary. He looked into Bud’s eyes as if searching for something.

My head hurts. Go figure.

Song shone the penlight in his eyes, asked him to follow the dancing finger again, then asked a couple of stupid questions, just as he had the night before. When he was satisfied with that, he pulled a stool close to the bed.

We’ve got to talk about yesterday evening. How much do you remember?

Too much. It was terrible.

Of course. You said last night that you didn’t see Kelli as she was, but with some kind of injury? Bud couldn’t help but notice the hesitation in the doctor’s voice.

Doc, not just some kind of injury. I’ve never seen anything like that outside of special effects in a slasher movie.

Could you give me the details of what you saw?

Jeez, Doc, really?

Just to see if there’s anything that stands out, he said, almost apologetically.

Okay. One side of her scalp was ripped up, and that side of her face was really messed up. Like it had been crushed. Her eye sort of fell out of its socket, and she was spitting teeth, and she was bleeding all over the place. But she kept talking to me like nothing was wrong, and I guess it wasn’t.

The doctor scribbled a few notes on the clipboard. And was there anything else? Sometimes when people have hallucinations, they’ve said they smelled an unusual smell or tasted an odd flavor.

I told you my vision’s a little screwy, but it changed just before I saw her face.

How?

Since I woke up, I’ve got this thin black crescent in my field of vision, Bud held out his arm and gestured, about right there. Just before Kelli came in, it stretched out across my whole field of vision, and faded as it opened up, until it was all the way across my field of view and transparent. Then I saw her that way and I didn’t see the crescent again until a few moments later, when you were in the room.

So you see it now?

Yeah.

The doctor wrote down a couple more notes, then turned back to Bud.

We’re still trying to figure out what caused your, ah, hallucination. The brain’s a tricky thing, and we’ll probably never have it completely figured out, but we’re going to keep looking at it, and when we find out anything new, we’ll let you know. I looked at your CAT scan last night and didn’t see anything alarming, but I checked over it again this morning just to verify. It showed nothing wrong at all with your brain. I’m going to order a cranial MRI, and a couple of vision tests for you, too, but I expect they’ll show us the same thing. The injuries you’ve sustained are perfectly in line with what occurred, and the questions and symptoms presenting now will probably just be overcome by events as you heal.

Bud noticed again how strangely the doctor spoke about the previous night’s hallucination. As he spoke about Bud healing, he began to sound crestfallen, almost regretful.

The door opened again,