![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeAnother freebie, totally unrelated to Foolathon. It's also possibly the most depressing thing I've ever written! :D
Ten Years to Vanish
Prompt: Stuff100 'Years,' H/C Bingo 'atonement'
Word count: 12,726
Summary: It takes Biff ten years to learn how to disappear.
Notes: First of all, the cave of light is a real place; it exists in my hometown. Also, this story involves graphic violence, suicide gone wrong, dysfunctional family dynamics, and general disturbing imagery. Consider yourself warned.
Ten
Biff is six when he sees the vanishing act on TV.
He doesn’t remember much of the rest at all, or even the magician, but he does remember the courageous assistant. She climbs into an enormous box, still smiling even as the magician shuts it in her face. The magician spins the box around, drives swords and stakes through it, kicks it off the platform, but when he opens the box, it’s empty. The pretty assistant has escaped, vanished—until she appears in the audience, waving and smiling her brave smile.
Biff knows that he’s interested in the wrong person. He should want to be the magician, the one with the fancy name, the swords and the stakes and the power, the one who gets all the applause. But he’d rather be the nameless assistant. She’s the one who disappeared.
For a moment, he closes his eyes, pretends he’s the one climbing into the box. He reaches deep down inside himself, hides in the dark stillness there, and pretends that he’s vanishing. He imagines himself disappearing, the surprise on everyone’s face. The feeling is so calming, so blissful that he smiles.
Then he opens his eyes, and he’s still there.
He can’t vanish yet. But he will one day.
Nine
Biff is seven when he comes home to the broken window.
The front door is hanging wide open, giving him a full view of the hall and past that, the kitchen. The big bay window that opens out on the back yard is completely shattered. Everything’s silent and still.
Biff stands out front with his lunchbox and his backpack, trying to think what to do, because he sure isn’t going in there alone. Maybe he can run to Heather’s house, try and make some excuse to stay with her for a bit, but no, it’s Thursday, she’s got ballet practice…
Before he can make up his mind, his mother comes out. She has a broom in one hand and a dustpan full of broken glass in the other. Her clothes are disheveled and she has a small plastic smile on her face. She sees Biff standing outside by the mailbox, but it takes her a moment to recognize him. She drifts off to empty the broken glass into the big garbage can, so it won’t gouge holes in the trash bags.
“Hi, sweetheart. How was school?”
Biff doesn’t move. “What happened to the window?”
“It broke. Don’t worry about it. Come inside.”
Biff stays where he is. “Heather invited me over. Can I go?”
“Doesn’t she have ballet on Thursdays?”
“Not today.”
“You’ll have to ask your father.”
That should be the end of it, but still, Biff hesitates. “I’m almost done with my fort out back. Can I go finish it?”
“It’s okay. Nothing’s wrong. Come inside. He missed you.”
Biff swallows, but he doesn’t move. He’s considering just cutting and running when he hears a whimper from the house. It starts with a snuffling, but quickly rises into a wail. His mother turns and stares at the doorway, but he’s not sure she knows what she’s hearing.
JoJo and Millie. The twins. They’re not even three yet, practically babies, and haven’t learned to be quiet yet.
Biff takes a deep breath. He reaches into that deep, still part of himself, takes a moment there to brace himself. He’s not here, he tells himself. He’s invisible, he’s vanished. Nothing can hurt him.
He goes into the house, and the door shuts behind him.
Eight
Biff is eight when his brain starts itching.
There’s a creek bed across the street. It’s filled with busted concrete, big rocks, scrubby trees, and if Biff moves very quietly and slowly, the occasional raccoon, snake, and deer. He spends a lot of his time in the summer there, tromping through poison ivy, eating dewberries, and searching for the treasures that get washed down in flood season: baseballs, fishing nets, spare toys. That summer, he finishes his fort, which he’s immensely proud of, even if there’s nobody to show it to yet. Millie and JoJo are still too young to be running wild in the creek bed, and Millie’s petrified of nature, of everything.
He’s sitting against one of the trees, eating a sandwich, when his mind starts to itch. The vanishing, smiling assistant won’t get out of his head, and even though he’s old enough to know better, he can’t shake the feeling that if he goes into that special part of himself and holds it just right, maybe…
The fantasy has been there for years, but over the past few months, it’s mutated into an excruciating itch in the back of his mind. He can’t keep his mind on anything else. It feels pressing, desperately important, and it never goes away.
Part of him wants to try, but he always veers off—it was all fine and good to play make-believe when he was little, but he’s too old for those games now. It’s just stupid stuff for babies. But his brain doesn’t seem to agree.
Biff looks around. Nobody comes to the creek bed in the summer but him. Nobody’s here to see, or ask him what he’s doing, or laugh at him. Maybe he should just do it, prove it doesn’t work, and never touch it again.
Biff takes a deep breath and reaches deep inside himself, chasing the itching feeling. It’s almost scary how deep it goes, so deep it’s almost like there’s nothing else there, not even him. Just a deep, black stillness in his core, like a cave, and inside, waiting for him…
Biff backs off, frightened despite himself. He shoves the sandwich in his mouth, gets up and stomps off to find something else to do, but now the itch is ten times worse, because he’s looked at it and thought about it, and now he knows beyond a doubt that it’s there.
He takes off through the creek bed, vaulting fallen tree trunks and nearly turning his ankle on loose rocks, but the itch follows him in the burning of his muscles and lungs. He crawls under roots and into cave networks, and the itch is still there in the quiet darkness. Finally, he sprints to one of the oaks, latches onto a branch, pulls himself up, climbs as high as he can go, till he’s surrounded by green leaves and mistletoe, till he can see up over the bank and watch the traffic go by, but nobody else can see him.
And the itch is still there. It doesn’t get better, it doesn’t get worse, it just waits. It’s in no hurry; it’s been waiting for him for years, and it feels like it’ll wait for a million mores.
Biff crouches up in the branches and shakes for a while, and then he caves, because God, it’s like poison ivy only it’s inside him, so he dives deep inside himself again, fast enough that he doesn’t have time to think. He plunges in, past all the things that make up his understanding, to that dark void where there’s nothing but the itch, and he grabs it to—
Colors explode all around him.
Biff freezes, and they vanish. Did he just…
The itch is better, but still there. He tries again.
This time, the colors are smoother, bubblier, a soft wash that doesn’t look like anything but it’s beautiful anyway. So Biff hangs on to the feeling, to see if he can, and the colors stay, undulating quietly to some rhythm that after a moment Biff recognizes as his heartbeat. Biff closes his eyes, and reopens them. The colors are still there.
They’re coming from him. He’s making them. And the realization brings up a joy that’s so intense Biff feels he might burst with it, and he laughs and whoops and starts dishing it out to see what he can do.
The itch goes away.
Seven
Biff manages to keep the secret until he’s nine… but only because he wants to see what he can do first, so he can really wow Heather.
Heather is his best friend who lives across the block and goes to Saint Columbkille’s Church, same as he does. She’s white with curly brown hair and she’s good at Bible study, better than he is because she’s the best reader in the class, while Biff still gets his letters confused. They’ve been friends since preschool, but lately, she’s been acting a little weird. She won’t play ball with him anymore, or anything that might get them dirty, and now she cares about makeup, which Biff couldn’t be less interested in.
But still, she’s his best friend, even if she’s acting weird right now, so he has to tell her. She will flip.
He sees her at youth Bible study every Sunday after Mass, and at break time, he sidles up to her, hands shoved in his pockets. She’s hanging with a few girls he thinks of as the Giggle Squad. They don’t like him much, for the usual reasons, but that’s okay; he doesn’t like them much either. What Heather sees in them is beyond him.
“Psst. Hey, Heather.”
She looks at him. One of the Giggle Squad sneers, “Oh look, it’s the monkey.”
“Bite me,” Biff replies, and turns back to Heather. “See you after Bible study? I got something you need to see.”
Heather looks a little dubious. Maybe because the last time he wanted to show her something, it was a coral snake and she almost got bit. “What is it?”
Biff grins and rocks back on his heels. “Can’t tell you. It’s a surprise.”
She exchanges glances with the Giggle Squad, and for a moment, he worries she’s gotten so weird that she’s going to say no. But then she smiles like she used to, back when she was normal and the best frog-catcher in the county, and she says, “Okay. My folks won’t miss me till three.”
“Great!” He hears the youth minister calling them in. “See you!”
Biff’s never been much good at holding still, but for the rest of Bible study, it’s about all he can do to keep from jumping up and dashing outside. He squirms and fidgets and jangles his knee so much that Karen, the youth minister, asks if he needs anything. He says no, and she prods him to recite the next verse of Kings I, but he’s completely lost his place and has to be reminded. Once he finds it, he stumbles and mumbles his way through it and goes right back to fidgeting.
When study’s over, he’s the first one out the door. Heather’s second.
“So what’s the surprise?” She asks. “It better be good, the way you’re carrying on.”
“It is, it is,” he assures, and hauls her off to the creek bed. He can do it in other places, but the creek bed gives him the most room, and he doesn’t have to be quiet like in the house at night, which is good, since the amount of joy it brings up is hard to strangle down. Besides, Heather used to know the place almost as good as him, back before she got weird.
He leads Heather to an open space where the grass isn’t too high and there’s a block of broken cement roughly the size of a bathtub near the middle. It’s bordered by the junkyard on one side and the sewage treatment plant on the other, so nobody ever comes there, making it a perfect (if smelly) practice field. He climbs on top of the cement and takes a deep breath, trying to reach that stillness inside him. It’s harder to do with distractions, like someone else watching him expectantly.
“Well? Come on!” Heather says, pulling on the cuff of his sock. “What’s the surprise?”
“Give it a second,” Biff whines, and she settles down. He scrunches up his face, tries to tune everything out: her, the world, himself…
He vanishes.
Heather stands frozen, mouth dropped open. After a moment, Biff pops back into view and stands on his block of concrete, arms crossed triumphantly. He’s been practicing this for ages.
Heather reaches out to poke him, like maybe he’s still gone, then gets a determined face and takes a firm grip on his ankle, as though he just ran away really fast. “Do it again!”
“Uh…” It still takes a lot of focus to do, and he can’t hold it for more than a second. He tries anyway, but he can already tell it’s not quite right, he’s lost the balance, so he just fuzzes and lurches around the edges for a bit. Heather jumps and jerks her hand away.
“You… you made my hand go weird!”
“I did?” Biff’s a little disappointed. He wanted it to be just him.
“How—how did you do that?”
Biff shrugs. “Dunno.”
“You don’t know?”
“Nah. I just… I think in a certain way, like when I’m praying, and… stuff happens. Neat, ain’t it?”
But Heather doesn’t seem to think it’s neat. She’s backing away from him now, looking wary. “How long have you been doing this?”
He shrugs. “A bit before my birthday, I guess. Ain’t it great? God gave it to me,” he adds proudly.
“God?”
“Well, who else d’you think? The President?”
Heather looks angry, but mostly, she looks scared. She puts her hands on her hips and says with authority, “The Devil could’ve done it.”
“Nuh huh!”
“Uh huh! How do you know it’s from God? What makes you so sure it’s from Him? Has He told you?”
“I… it…” Because the joy it brings up feels so right, and he wants to do this for the rest of his life, and—
“If this is God’s gift to you, why hasn’t He given it to anyone else? I know more about the Bible than you do; I pray more than you do; I put more in the collection plate than you do. Why would He give it to you? You can’t even read, and you’re in the fourth grade!”
“I can too read!” Biff shouts, but she keeps going.
“You don’t know anything. You don’t even know what it is or how it works! I don’t think it’s from God at all. God would never have given something like that to someone like you!”
She’s been backing away from him the whole time she’s been talking, and now she spins around and starts walking away.
“You don’t know!” Biff shouts after her. “You don’t know anything!”
She keeps walking.
“You’re just jealous!”
She doesn’t even turn around.
“Come on!”
She’s gone.
Biff sits on the concrete so hard it bruises and wraps his arms around his knees. He sniffs.
“Yeah, well, what do you know,” he mutters. “You’re just a stupid girl.”
He doesn’t know what he expects Heather to do. Tell on him, maybe. But she doesn’t. Maybe nobody will believe her that Monkey MacGilligan can do anything. As far as he knows, she never tells anybody.
She just never speaks to him again.
Which is fine with him. What does he care? He’s used to people not talking to him because he’s Catholic, or because all his jeans have the knees worn out, or because he gets real dark in the summer and his sisters have kinky hair. They don’t matter. None of them matter. If the Devil gave him this, he would know.
Right?
He decides to test it, and so he stops going to that still, joyful part of himself. If it is from the Devil, surely something horrible will happen, something to tempt him again. If it comes from God, God will tell him to come back to it. And then he’ll know for sure if it’s a good or a bad thing.
But nothing happens. The quiet place just sits patiently inside him, like it did before he discovered it. Not making any big noise, not putting up a fuss, just letting him know it’s there with its quiet itch. Waiting for him.
He comes back to it after a few weeks. It hurts too much not to.
Six
Biff doesn’t show or tell anybody else until he’s ten. He just spends a lot of time on his own in the creek bed and comes home with cockleburs in his socks. It’s easy to get away with. Things are going good for the old man at the factory, so the few times he is home, he’s in a good mood, and as for his mother, anything that doesn’t involve him hanging around all summer going, “I’m bored,” she approves of. And once the school year starts, his little sisters start kindergarten, so things are too hectic for his mom to notice anything but bedtime and where JoJo’s shoes are and how Millie’s teddy bear got there.
So whenever he gets a chance, he goes to the creek bed, makes his way to the clearing with its block of concrete, and he practices.
He still doesn’t know what to call what he does, but he figures it’s less important than knowing how to do it. And he’s getting better. He’s given up on vanishing for now, but he’s got colors down pretty good, even if he can’t think what he’d use them for. Weather and atmospheric effects, he can do too, but it only works for sight, and without warning wind or the smell of incoming rain, he feels like it’s not so convincing. Plus, doing it over a big distance is hard, and he can’t fill the sky. It’s just too big.
So he focuses on smaller things. Creating them, like the faces of JoJo or Millie. It’s hard in a much different way. Colors, weather, that stuff is pretty loose and doesn’t require that much attention to detail, but creation requires he have an exact picture in his mind, or else it comes out horrifyingly distorted. He thought he knew faces well, but he has to look at them in a whole new way now, memorize all the details, like the curve in his dad’s broken nose, the exact way the blue and green mix in Millie’s eyes. It’s hard, but not bad hard, like when his teachers try to get him to read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and he trips over words like ‘monotonous.’ No, it’s good hard, like stretching or running, feeling his lungs burn and his heart pound and the wind through his clothes. It’s a challenge.
It’s amazing.
Still, he feels a lurking sense of guilt, doing it alone. Like if he wasn’t doing something wrong, he’d be doing it with somebody. He still doesn’t know what it is, or why or how he can do it. He just can. It still feels better than anything else ever, but…
He doesn’t like it, but Heather’s right about one thing: he doesn’t look like someone who would do anything special. He wears other folks’ K-mart hand-me-downs. He still can’t read so good. And even though he’s strong for his age and can move faster than people expect, he’s still a bowlegged, squashed-faced monkey lez. If he heard about someone like that being able to do things, he’d probably think God would choose a better representative.
Finally, when he’s ten, he caves. He has to tell someone else, someone who can help tell him what it’s all about. Someone older.
There’s the youth minister, and she’s all right. But she might tell his parents, and they might be mad that he didn’t tell them first, and anyway, then three people would know. Same problem with the priest… and Father McCarthy is kinda a shriveled old fart anyway. He could try confession, but confession is just for doing things that are wrong, and Biff still isn’t convinced. He shouldn’t have to fess up if it isn’t wrong. Definitely not his teachers. They’re sick of him enough already, after all the conferences about his reading and ‘applying himself.’
Which leaves his mom.
Words have never been his strong point, and he doesn’t know what he’d say anyway, so he figures he’ll just show her, same as Heather. So one Saturday, when JoJo and Millie are safely parked in front of the TV with their Froot Loops, Dad hasn’t gotten up yet, and his mom’s frying bacon, he walks up to her, hands stuffed in his pockets, leans against the counter, and says, “Hey Mom? I got something to show you.”
When she looks up, plate of bacon in her hands, he pulls his hands out of his pockets, reaches into himself, and eases his mind into that special balance that’s so hard to maintain. He doesn’t vanish—he hasn’t tried since Heather—but his image warps and bends and flickers like bad TV reception.
She freezes. She stares.
He lets his image return to normal after a few seconds.
She stands there, pale and rigid. She has that funny, stiff little smile on her face. For a moment, he thinks she’s going to drop the plate of bacon, but she doesn’t. Instead, she turns around and walks away.
Biff stays where he is. He watches his mom bring JoJo and Millie their bacon and kiss their foreheads while they watch Care Bears. She comes back in and puts the plate in the sink. Then she goes to the kitchen table and chooses a chair for herself.
“Sit down,” she tells Biff.
Biff sits.
She reaches into her pocket, pulls out a pack of Camels, lights one up. Her hands are shaking, just barely, enough that he wouldn’t have noticed if the lighter flame wasn’t shaking with her. She takes a deep breath, and the smoke seems to steady her.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asks.
Biff hesitates. He suspects he’s in trouble. Finally, he says, “Since I was nine.”
Another deep breath. “Who have you told?”
“Heather.”
“And?”
“You.”
“No one else? Not your father?”
Biff shakes his head.
She goes limp against the chair. “Good. Don’t tell your father.”
She gets up, starts washing the dishes, and never speaks of it again.
Five
Biff is eleven when he finds Millie crying.
By this time, their mom has started working again, so JoJo and Millie stay at the Extend-A-Care after-school program until three thirty, when Biff gets out of school. Then he picks them up, walks them home and watches over them till five thirty, when their mom gets back.
Usually, when they see him, the twins are all bouncing brown curls and skipping giggles. But this time, Millie’s crying, and JoJo’s gray-green eyes are huge and solemn, and there’s no skipping, and Biff’s hackles go up.
“What happened?” He asks. “What’s the matter?”
But Millie shakes her head and hides her face, and JoJo looks away, twisting the bottom of her shirt between her hands.
Biff asks again, but Millie just shakes her head again and he can tell he’s not going to get anything, not yet anyway. So he takes their hands and takes them home. He’s distracted and upset enough that he doesn’t even hear the jeering from the other sixth graders. He’s JoJo and Millie’s big brother; he can’t keep them safe from everything that’ll make them cry, but he can try.
When they get home, he gets them juice boxes, which helps them feel better, and Millie stops crying. He asks if they want pancakes, which is the easiest thing he knows by heart, and they say yes, but only with strawberries.
Biff digs the butter, milk, eggs, strawberries, and Cool Whip out of the fridge, and the twins fetch the dry ingredients. He mixes the ingredients, dry and wet separate, and JoJo and Millie watch as they drink their juice, stealing batter from the mixing bowl but without their usual vigor. Usually, there’s a fight for the first pancakes, which get the best of the butter on the pan, but this time, they quietly share.
“So what happened?” He asks JoJo, since Millie isn’t talking. JoJo’s more stubborn, but she also keeps less to herself.
Millie’s eyes are still red and puffy, and her mouth is full of pancake, so her, “Nothing,” doesn’t have as much punch, and Biff makes as though to take the pancakes and Cool Whip away.
JoJo is the bigger sucker for his cooking. She caves. “It’s Raymond at Extend-A-Care,” she says.
“Raymond?” Their part of town isn’t that big, but he doesn’t know anyone their age with that name. “He new?”
“No,” JoJo says, making a grab for the plate of pancakes. Biff just raises it above his head, where she can’t reach. “Raymond. Ms. Grenier’s son.”
“Oh.” Raymond Grenier just got out of high school, and he’s the sort of person parents warn about. “So what happened?”
But JoJo looks at Millie, and they shut their mouths tight. Millie shakes her head, and no amount of pancake bribery will get her or JoJo to say anything else.
Biff knows he isn’t the smartest kid around, but it’s not nothing that’s got them so upset. Ms. Grenier runs the Extend-A-Care, which is the only program close by the MacGilligans can afford. If she’s keeping an eye on Raymond by having him hang around the Extend-A-Care, the odds of the girls getting away from him are nothing. Their mom can’t leave work early, and Biff can’t ditch school early (even if he wants to). And telling means maybe getting in trouble with Ms. Grenier, Raymond, their parents, or all three. The old man doesn’t like having his time wasted, and he doesn’t like people who can’t stand up for themselves.
So Biff takes a deep breath, pushes down the anger brewing in his gut, and says casually, “Okay. So it’s nothing. Want him to never do it again?”
JoJo and Millie eye him nervously.
“What you gonna do?” JoJo asks.
Biff shrugs. “Nothing.”
“No, really. What you gonna do?”
“Don’t do anything!” Millie shouts. “I told you! Nothing happened! You seen Raymond Grenier? He’s like gigantic! He’s even bigger than Dad! If he finds out we told—”
Biff is already putting the frying pan in the sink and headed for the door. “I told you I ain’t doing nothing. Go watch some Care Bears, okay? I’ll be back before Mom gets home.”
He makes for the door, but they chase after him.
“Where you going?” JoJo asks.
“Nowhere.”
“Can we come?” JoJo asks.
“No! Now scram, and don’t tell Mom I was gone.”
He slams the door behind him. JoJo and Millie open it again right away, of course, but by then, he’s vanished.
“Where’d he go?” He hears JoJo ask, and then he’s out of earshot.
Biff has never tried to do this while angry. It works well—he manages to hold it just long enough to get out of their eyesight, and they’re far enough away not to notice the blur effect he still hasn’t been able to fix. His adrenaline is thrumming and his heart is pounding, but his head feels clear, just filled with purpose.
He goes back to the Extend-A-Care. By this time, most of the kids are gone, and it’s starting to close down. Biff finds Raymond Grenier outside taking trash out to the Dumpster and starts following. No vanishing, this time; he’s not sure he can pull it off again so soon, and he can be unnoticeable just on his own. He hangs back, acts like he’s just wandering by, and when Raymond goes back in, he vanishes again and follows. Quietly—he doesn’t have a lot of faith in his vanish act yet, no matter how angry he is.
Raymond goes in and starts folding up chairs and dragging them off, a look of dull boredom on his face. He’s not really that big, just solid, with a greasy mullet and fuzz on his chin, and he hauls the folding chairs off four at a time.
Until now, Biff hasn’t really thought about what he’s going to do. But he can feel his brain wavering, and his image is starting to flicker and lurch like a ghost effect from a cheap movie; he won’t fool anyone. But as Raymond shuffles down the narrow hall, chairs under his arms, Biff gets an idea.
He’s never thought to do this before, but he knows it’ll be the easiest thing he’s ever done. The simplest thing someone can see, after all, is nothing.
Biff takes a good look around, marking the surroundings, and then plunges the hall into darkness. It’s a relief not to have to hold the vanish anymore.
He hears Raymond curse and drop one of the chairs. Then fumbling for the light switch. A click, but of course, nothing happens.
Biff waits.
Raymond Grenier curses some more, but he’s not afraid yet, just annoyed. He turns around to head back towards the play room, and Biff sticks out a leg. It gets him a chair to the face, which makes the darkness throb, but it works: Raymond falls headlong with a crash.
“Who’s there?” Raymond shouts. The warping of the darkness seems to have set him off.
Biff doesn’t answer, mostly because his nose is all white hot pain and his eyes are full of tears, and it’s taking all his concentration to keep the darkness up. It’s still throbbing, writhing in time to the pain in his face, which makes for a pretty nauseating effect. (In the back of his head, some part of him that’s not busy with pain swears he’ll get that fixed one day, learn to keep an image steady no matter what.)
“Don’t play games with me, you little shit, I know you’re there!” Raymond snarls. He sounds like he’s starting to get up, so Biff kicks him. In the dark, he can’t tell where it hits, but it connects good and solid, and Raymond Grenier grunts with pain.
“The hell is your problem? What do you want?” Raymond shouts, but an edge of fear is starting to come into his voice.
Biff doesn’t speak. Warm wetness is streaming over his face, forcing him to breathe through his mouth. If he speaks now, he won’t be able to keep the pain out of his voice and he’ll be sunk. But he’s good at staying quiet, holding still. His whole family is. Pain is just weakness leaving the body; he can wait it out.
He can’t keep his breathing from sounding loud, but that just seems to freak Raymond out more.
“The hell do you fucking want?” Raymond shrieks.
After a while, the pain ebbs to a manageable level, and Biff’s able to silence his breathing, but he still doesn’t speak. He listens to Raymond’s sharp, fast breathing, and he waits.
Until Raymond says, “Mom?”
“She’s not coming,” Biff says. He whispers so it won’t be so obvious that he’s a child, or that his nose is clogged.
“The fuck do you want, you little shithead? I’ll fucking kill you!” He hears Raymond move and something brushes his pant leg. Biff stamps and gets lucky—Raymond howls. Then, silent as a ghost in his thin sneakers, Biff pulls back so he won’t get grabbed.
“No you won’t,” he whispers. “You can’t see.”
Silence. Harsh breathing. Biff waits.
“What did you do to me?”
Biff says nothing.
“The lights. What’d you do to the lights?”
Biff smiles.
“The fuck do you want, you little freakshow?”
But Biff’s not afraid. This darkness is his, he owns it, and for once, he’s the one in control. He feels the blood drip down his lips, and he waits.
“What do you want?” The voice is quiet and broken now.
“Never touch them again,” Biff whispers.
“What? Who?”
“The kids. Never touch them again.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Biff’s face is still throbbing, and he lets it leak into the darkness again. It goes into a sickening swirl. “You never want to see again?”
“Okay! Okay! I’ll—I’ll leave them alone, I swear.”
Biff pulls the darkness back into shape. “You better. Or I’ll come back.”
Biff knows that really, he can’t turn someone blind forever. But at that moment, he feels like he could. Like if he had to, he would cut school for a week, just to follow Raymond Grenier around and keep him in the darkness for as long as necessary.
Biff vanishes—or at least, he hopes he vanishes, not like he can visually check he results—and he banishes the dark. Raymond Grenier is curled on his hands and knees on the floor, chairs scattered around him. When the lights—the everything—come back on, his head jerks up. He looks terrified, but he glances around, sees the hall, sees everything looking normal, and he starts to calm down. Biff can already tell he’s starting to dismiss it as a freak accident, brief insanity, nothing important.
Biff is short for his age, but he’s husky, and a lot stronger than people expect him to be. He kicks Raymond Grenier hard in the kidney, where he knows it hurts, and he hisses, “I’m watching.”
Then he leaves. His face still throbs, and the blood on his lips and chin are sticky, but he’s smiling. He feels good, adrenaline and blood humming through him. Everything feels calm and under control. He’s fixed it. Raymond Grenier won’t be bugging his sisters again.
Then he comes home and sees the car in the driveway, and that’s the end of that feeling. Is Mom early? Is he late? It doesn’t matter; he’s still in deep shit.
The front door bursts open and his mom storms out, frantic.
“Where have you been? You know never to leave your sisters alone, and—” She sees the blood on his face and shirt. She goes still, and her voice gets deadly quiet. “What did you do?”
Biff stares back at her, keeping his expression empty. “Nothing,” he says, and he pulls up the bottom of his shirt to wipe his face on.
She grabs his shoulders and shakes him. “You tell me what you did.”
Biff looks at her and he says, “Fell down the stairs.”
He should’ve known better. She slaps him. It’s not hard—his mom doesn’t hit—but it hurts in a worse way than the chair to the face did. He ducks his head behind his bangs, sniffs back blood, and pretends he didn’t feel it.
She wipes her hands on her apron. “Get inside and wash your face. We’ll discuss this when your father gets home.”
Biff shuffles past her, head down. In the TV room, Millie and JoJo are sitting in front of the TV with wide eyes, but it’s him they’re watching. The plates of pancake crumbs are still in front of them.
As he passes them, he gives them a thumbs-up and a smile. Then he hurries to his room to wait for the old man comes home.
--Continued in Part Two
Ten Years to Vanish
Prompt: Stuff100 'Years,' H/C Bingo 'atonement'
Word count: 12,726
Summary: It takes Biff ten years to learn how to disappear.
Notes: First of all, the cave of light is a real place; it exists in my hometown. Also, this story involves graphic violence, suicide gone wrong, dysfunctional family dynamics, and general disturbing imagery. Consider yourself warned.
Ten
Biff is six when he sees the vanishing act on TV.
He doesn’t remember much of the rest at all, or even the magician, but he does remember the courageous assistant. She climbs into an enormous box, still smiling even as the magician shuts it in her face. The magician spins the box around, drives swords and stakes through it, kicks it off the platform, but when he opens the box, it’s empty. The pretty assistant has escaped, vanished—until she appears in the audience, waving and smiling her brave smile.
Biff knows that he’s interested in the wrong person. He should want to be the magician, the one with the fancy name, the swords and the stakes and the power, the one who gets all the applause. But he’d rather be the nameless assistant. She’s the one who disappeared.
For a moment, he closes his eyes, pretends he’s the one climbing into the box. He reaches deep down inside himself, hides in the dark stillness there, and pretends that he’s vanishing. He imagines himself disappearing, the surprise on everyone’s face. The feeling is so calming, so blissful that he smiles.
Then he opens his eyes, and he’s still there.
He can’t vanish yet. But he will one day.
Nine
Biff is seven when he comes home to the broken window.
The front door is hanging wide open, giving him a full view of the hall and past that, the kitchen. The big bay window that opens out on the back yard is completely shattered. Everything’s silent and still.
Biff stands out front with his lunchbox and his backpack, trying to think what to do, because he sure isn’t going in there alone. Maybe he can run to Heather’s house, try and make some excuse to stay with her for a bit, but no, it’s Thursday, she’s got ballet practice…
Before he can make up his mind, his mother comes out. She has a broom in one hand and a dustpan full of broken glass in the other. Her clothes are disheveled and she has a small plastic smile on her face. She sees Biff standing outside by the mailbox, but it takes her a moment to recognize him. She drifts off to empty the broken glass into the big garbage can, so it won’t gouge holes in the trash bags.
“Hi, sweetheart. How was school?”
Biff doesn’t move. “What happened to the window?”
“It broke. Don’t worry about it. Come inside.”
Biff stays where he is. “Heather invited me over. Can I go?”
“Doesn’t she have ballet on Thursdays?”
“Not today.”
“You’ll have to ask your father.”
That should be the end of it, but still, Biff hesitates. “I’m almost done with my fort out back. Can I go finish it?”
“It’s okay. Nothing’s wrong. Come inside. He missed you.”
Biff swallows, but he doesn’t move. He’s considering just cutting and running when he hears a whimper from the house. It starts with a snuffling, but quickly rises into a wail. His mother turns and stares at the doorway, but he’s not sure she knows what she’s hearing.
JoJo and Millie. The twins. They’re not even three yet, practically babies, and haven’t learned to be quiet yet.
Biff takes a deep breath. He reaches into that deep, still part of himself, takes a moment there to brace himself. He’s not here, he tells himself. He’s invisible, he’s vanished. Nothing can hurt him.
He goes into the house, and the door shuts behind him.
Eight
Biff is eight when his brain starts itching.
There’s a creek bed across the street. It’s filled with busted concrete, big rocks, scrubby trees, and if Biff moves very quietly and slowly, the occasional raccoon, snake, and deer. He spends a lot of his time in the summer there, tromping through poison ivy, eating dewberries, and searching for the treasures that get washed down in flood season: baseballs, fishing nets, spare toys. That summer, he finishes his fort, which he’s immensely proud of, even if there’s nobody to show it to yet. Millie and JoJo are still too young to be running wild in the creek bed, and Millie’s petrified of nature, of everything.
He’s sitting against one of the trees, eating a sandwich, when his mind starts to itch. The vanishing, smiling assistant won’t get out of his head, and even though he’s old enough to know better, he can’t shake the feeling that if he goes into that special part of himself and holds it just right, maybe…
The fantasy has been there for years, but over the past few months, it’s mutated into an excruciating itch in the back of his mind. He can’t keep his mind on anything else. It feels pressing, desperately important, and it never goes away.
Part of him wants to try, but he always veers off—it was all fine and good to play make-believe when he was little, but he’s too old for those games now. It’s just stupid stuff for babies. But his brain doesn’t seem to agree.
Biff looks around. Nobody comes to the creek bed in the summer but him. Nobody’s here to see, or ask him what he’s doing, or laugh at him. Maybe he should just do it, prove it doesn’t work, and never touch it again.
Biff takes a deep breath and reaches deep inside himself, chasing the itching feeling. It’s almost scary how deep it goes, so deep it’s almost like there’s nothing else there, not even him. Just a deep, black stillness in his core, like a cave, and inside, waiting for him…
Biff backs off, frightened despite himself. He shoves the sandwich in his mouth, gets up and stomps off to find something else to do, but now the itch is ten times worse, because he’s looked at it and thought about it, and now he knows beyond a doubt that it’s there.
He takes off through the creek bed, vaulting fallen tree trunks and nearly turning his ankle on loose rocks, but the itch follows him in the burning of his muscles and lungs. He crawls under roots and into cave networks, and the itch is still there in the quiet darkness. Finally, he sprints to one of the oaks, latches onto a branch, pulls himself up, climbs as high as he can go, till he’s surrounded by green leaves and mistletoe, till he can see up over the bank and watch the traffic go by, but nobody else can see him.
And the itch is still there. It doesn’t get better, it doesn’t get worse, it just waits. It’s in no hurry; it’s been waiting for him for years, and it feels like it’ll wait for a million mores.
Biff crouches up in the branches and shakes for a while, and then he caves, because God, it’s like poison ivy only it’s inside him, so he dives deep inside himself again, fast enough that he doesn’t have time to think. He plunges in, past all the things that make up his understanding, to that dark void where there’s nothing but the itch, and he grabs it to—
Colors explode all around him.
Biff freezes, and they vanish. Did he just…
The itch is better, but still there. He tries again.
This time, the colors are smoother, bubblier, a soft wash that doesn’t look like anything but it’s beautiful anyway. So Biff hangs on to the feeling, to see if he can, and the colors stay, undulating quietly to some rhythm that after a moment Biff recognizes as his heartbeat. Biff closes his eyes, and reopens them. The colors are still there.
They’re coming from him. He’s making them. And the realization brings up a joy that’s so intense Biff feels he might burst with it, and he laughs and whoops and starts dishing it out to see what he can do.
The itch goes away.
Seven
Biff manages to keep the secret until he’s nine… but only because he wants to see what he can do first, so he can really wow Heather.
Heather is his best friend who lives across the block and goes to Saint Columbkille’s Church, same as he does. She’s white with curly brown hair and she’s good at Bible study, better than he is because she’s the best reader in the class, while Biff still gets his letters confused. They’ve been friends since preschool, but lately, she’s been acting a little weird. She won’t play ball with him anymore, or anything that might get them dirty, and now she cares about makeup, which Biff couldn’t be less interested in.
But still, she’s his best friend, even if she’s acting weird right now, so he has to tell her. She will flip.
He sees her at youth Bible study every Sunday after Mass, and at break time, he sidles up to her, hands shoved in his pockets. She’s hanging with a few girls he thinks of as the Giggle Squad. They don’t like him much, for the usual reasons, but that’s okay; he doesn’t like them much either. What Heather sees in them is beyond him.
“Psst. Hey, Heather.”
She looks at him. One of the Giggle Squad sneers, “Oh look, it’s the monkey.”
“Bite me,” Biff replies, and turns back to Heather. “See you after Bible study? I got something you need to see.”
Heather looks a little dubious. Maybe because the last time he wanted to show her something, it was a coral snake and she almost got bit. “What is it?”
Biff grins and rocks back on his heels. “Can’t tell you. It’s a surprise.”
She exchanges glances with the Giggle Squad, and for a moment, he worries she’s gotten so weird that she’s going to say no. But then she smiles like she used to, back when she was normal and the best frog-catcher in the county, and she says, “Okay. My folks won’t miss me till three.”
“Great!” He hears the youth minister calling them in. “See you!”
Biff’s never been much good at holding still, but for the rest of Bible study, it’s about all he can do to keep from jumping up and dashing outside. He squirms and fidgets and jangles his knee so much that Karen, the youth minister, asks if he needs anything. He says no, and she prods him to recite the next verse of Kings I, but he’s completely lost his place and has to be reminded. Once he finds it, he stumbles and mumbles his way through it and goes right back to fidgeting.
When study’s over, he’s the first one out the door. Heather’s second.
“So what’s the surprise?” She asks. “It better be good, the way you’re carrying on.”
“It is, it is,” he assures, and hauls her off to the creek bed. He can do it in other places, but the creek bed gives him the most room, and he doesn’t have to be quiet like in the house at night, which is good, since the amount of joy it brings up is hard to strangle down. Besides, Heather used to know the place almost as good as him, back before she got weird.
He leads Heather to an open space where the grass isn’t too high and there’s a block of broken cement roughly the size of a bathtub near the middle. It’s bordered by the junkyard on one side and the sewage treatment plant on the other, so nobody ever comes there, making it a perfect (if smelly) practice field. He climbs on top of the cement and takes a deep breath, trying to reach that stillness inside him. It’s harder to do with distractions, like someone else watching him expectantly.
“Well? Come on!” Heather says, pulling on the cuff of his sock. “What’s the surprise?”
“Give it a second,” Biff whines, and she settles down. He scrunches up his face, tries to tune everything out: her, the world, himself…
He vanishes.
Heather stands frozen, mouth dropped open. After a moment, Biff pops back into view and stands on his block of concrete, arms crossed triumphantly. He’s been practicing this for ages.
Heather reaches out to poke him, like maybe he’s still gone, then gets a determined face and takes a firm grip on his ankle, as though he just ran away really fast. “Do it again!”
“Uh…” It still takes a lot of focus to do, and he can’t hold it for more than a second. He tries anyway, but he can already tell it’s not quite right, he’s lost the balance, so he just fuzzes and lurches around the edges for a bit. Heather jumps and jerks her hand away.
“You… you made my hand go weird!”
“I did?” Biff’s a little disappointed. He wanted it to be just him.
“How—how did you do that?”
Biff shrugs. “Dunno.”
“You don’t know?”
“Nah. I just… I think in a certain way, like when I’m praying, and… stuff happens. Neat, ain’t it?”
But Heather doesn’t seem to think it’s neat. She’s backing away from him now, looking wary. “How long have you been doing this?”
He shrugs. “A bit before my birthday, I guess. Ain’t it great? God gave it to me,” he adds proudly.
“God?”
“Well, who else d’you think? The President?”
Heather looks angry, but mostly, she looks scared. She puts her hands on her hips and says with authority, “The Devil could’ve done it.”
“Nuh huh!”
“Uh huh! How do you know it’s from God? What makes you so sure it’s from Him? Has He told you?”
“I… it…” Because the joy it brings up feels so right, and he wants to do this for the rest of his life, and—
“If this is God’s gift to you, why hasn’t He given it to anyone else? I know more about the Bible than you do; I pray more than you do; I put more in the collection plate than you do. Why would He give it to you? You can’t even read, and you’re in the fourth grade!”
“I can too read!” Biff shouts, but she keeps going.
“You don’t know anything. You don’t even know what it is or how it works! I don’t think it’s from God at all. God would never have given something like that to someone like you!”
She’s been backing away from him the whole time she’s been talking, and now she spins around and starts walking away.
“You don’t know!” Biff shouts after her. “You don’t know anything!”
She keeps walking.
“You’re just jealous!”
She doesn’t even turn around.
“Come on!”
She’s gone.
Biff sits on the concrete so hard it bruises and wraps his arms around his knees. He sniffs.
“Yeah, well, what do you know,” he mutters. “You’re just a stupid girl.”
He doesn’t know what he expects Heather to do. Tell on him, maybe. But she doesn’t. Maybe nobody will believe her that Monkey MacGilligan can do anything. As far as he knows, she never tells anybody.
She just never speaks to him again.
Which is fine with him. What does he care? He’s used to people not talking to him because he’s Catholic, or because all his jeans have the knees worn out, or because he gets real dark in the summer and his sisters have kinky hair. They don’t matter. None of them matter. If the Devil gave him this, he would know.
Right?
He decides to test it, and so he stops going to that still, joyful part of himself. If it is from the Devil, surely something horrible will happen, something to tempt him again. If it comes from God, God will tell him to come back to it. And then he’ll know for sure if it’s a good or a bad thing.
But nothing happens. The quiet place just sits patiently inside him, like it did before he discovered it. Not making any big noise, not putting up a fuss, just letting him know it’s there with its quiet itch. Waiting for him.
He comes back to it after a few weeks. It hurts too much not to.
Six
Biff doesn’t show or tell anybody else until he’s ten. He just spends a lot of time on his own in the creek bed and comes home with cockleburs in his socks. It’s easy to get away with. Things are going good for the old man at the factory, so the few times he is home, he’s in a good mood, and as for his mother, anything that doesn’t involve him hanging around all summer going, “I’m bored,” she approves of. And once the school year starts, his little sisters start kindergarten, so things are too hectic for his mom to notice anything but bedtime and where JoJo’s shoes are and how Millie’s teddy bear got there.
So whenever he gets a chance, he goes to the creek bed, makes his way to the clearing with its block of concrete, and he practices.
He still doesn’t know what to call what he does, but he figures it’s less important than knowing how to do it. And he’s getting better. He’s given up on vanishing for now, but he’s got colors down pretty good, even if he can’t think what he’d use them for. Weather and atmospheric effects, he can do too, but it only works for sight, and without warning wind or the smell of incoming rain, he feels like it’s not so convincing. Plus, doing it over a big distance is hard, and he can’t fill the sky. It’s just too big.
So he focuses on smaller things. Creating them, like the faces of JoJo or Millie. It’s hard in a much different way. Colors, weather, that stuff is pretty loose and doesn’t require that much attention to detail, but creation requires he have an exact picture in his mind, or else it comes out horrifyingly distorted. He thought he knew faces well, but he has to look at them in a whole new way now, memorize all the details, like the curve in his dad’s broken nose, the exact way the blue and green mix in Millie’s eyes. It’s hard, but not bad hard, like when his teachers try to get him to read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and he trips over words like ‘monotonous.’ No, it’s good hard, like stretching or running, feeling his lungs burn and his heart pound and the wind through his clothes. It’s a challenge.
It’s amazing.
Still, he feels a lurking sense of guilt, doing it alone. Like if he wasn’t doing something wrong, he’d be doing it with somebody. He still doesn’t know what it is, or why or how he can do it. He just can. It still feels better than anything else ever, but…
He doesn’t like it, but Heather’s right about one thing: he doesn’t look like someone who would do anything special. He wears other folks’ K-mart hand-me-downs. He still can’t read so good. And even though he’s strong for his age and can move faster than people expect, he’s still a bowlegged, squashed-faced monkey lez. If he heard about someone like that being able to do things, he’d probably think God would choose a better representative.
Finally, when he’s ten, he caves. He has to tell someone else, someone who can help tell him what it’s all about. Someone older.
There’s the youth minister, and she’s all right. But she might tell his parents, and they might be mad that he didn’t tell them first, and anyway, then three people would know. Same problem with the priest… and Father McCarthy is kinda a shriveled old fart anyway. He could try confession, but confession is just for doing things that are wrong, and Biff still isn’t convinced. He shouldn’t have to fess up if it isn’t wrong. Definitely not his teachers. They’re sick of him enough already, after all the conferences about his reading and ‘applying himself.’
Which leaves his mom.
Words have never been his strong point, and he doesn’t know what he’d say anyway, so he figures he’ll just show her, same as Heather. So one Saturday, when JoJo and Millie are safely parked in front of the TV with their Froot Loops, Dad hasn’t gotten up yet, and his mom’s frying bacon, he walks up to her, hands stuffed in his pockets, leans against the counter, and says, “Hey Mom? I got something to show you.”
When she looks up, plate of bacon in her hands, he pulls his hands out of his pockets, reaches into himself, and eases his mind into that special balance that’s so hard to maintain. He doesn’t vanish—he hasn’t tried since Heather—but his image warps and bends and flickers like bad TV reception.
She freezes. She stares.
He lets his image return to normal after a few seconds.
She stands there, pale and rigid. She has that funny, stiff little smile on her face. For a moment, he thinks she’s going to drop the plate of bacon, but she doesn’t. Instead, she turns around and walks away.
Biff stays where he is. He watches his mom bring JoJo and Millie their bacon and kiss their foreheads while they watch Care Bears. She comes back in and puts the plate in the sink. Then she goes to the kitchen table and chooses a chair for herself.
“Sit down,” she tells Biff.
Biff sits.
She reaches into her pocket, pulls out a pack of Camels, lights one up. Her hands are shaking, just barely, enough that he wouldn’t have noticed if the lighter flame wasn’t shaking with her. She takes a deep breath, and the smoke seems to steady her.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asks.
Biff hesitates. He suspects he’s in trouble. Finally, he says, “Since I was nine.”
Another deep breath. “Who have you told?”
“Heather.”
“And?”
“You.”
“No one else? Not your father?”
Biff shakes his head.
She goes limp against the chair. “Good. Don’t tell your father.”
She gets up, starts washing the dishes, and never speaks of it again.
Five
Biff is eleven when he finds Millie crying.
By this time, their mom has started working again, so JoJo and Millie stay at the Extend-A-Care after-school program until three thirty, when Biff gets out of school. Then he picks them up, walks them home and watches over them till five thirty, when their mom gets back.
Usually, when they see him, the twins are all bouncing brown curls and skipping giggles. But this time, Millie’s crying, and JoJo’s gray-green eyes are huge and solemn, and there’s no skipping, and Biff’s hackles go up.
“What happened?” He asks. “What’s the matter?”
But Millie shakes her head and hides her face, and JoJo looks away, twisting the bottom of her shirt between her hands.
Biff asks again, but Millie just shakes her head again and he can tell he’s not going to get anything, not yet anyway. So he takes their hands and takes them home. He’s distracted and upset enough that he doesn’t even hear the jeering from the other sixth graders. He’s JoJo and Millie’s big brother; he can’t keep them safe from everything that’ll make them cry, but he can try.
When they get home, he gets them juice boxes, which helps them feel better, and Millie stops crying. He asks if they want pancakes, which is the easiest thing he knows by heart, and they say yes, but only with strawberries.
Biff digs the butter, milk, eggs, strawberries, and Cool Whip out of the fridge, and the twins fetch the dry ingredients. He mixes the ingredients, dry and wet separate, and JoJo and Millie watch as they drink their juice, stealing batter from the mixing bowl but without their usual vigor. Usually, there’s a fight for the first pancakes, which get the best of the butter on the pan, but this time, they quietly share.
“So what happened?” He asks JoJo, since Millie isn’t talking. JoJo’s more stubborn, but she also keeps less to herself.
Millie’s eyes are still red and puffy, and her mouth is full of pancake, so her, “Nothing,” doesn’t have as much punch, and Biff makes as though to take the pancakes and Cool Whip away.
JoJo is the bigger sucker for his cooking. She caves. “It’s Raymond at Extend-A-Care,” she says.
“Raymond?” Their part of town isn’t that big, but he doesn’t know anyone their age with that name. “He new?”
“No,” JoJo says, making a grab for the plate of pancakes. Biff just raises it above his head, where she can’t reach. “Raymond. Ms. Grenier’s son.”
“Oh.” Raymond Grenier just got out of high school, and he’s the sort of person parents warn about. “So what happened?”
But JoJo looks at Millie, and they shut their mouths tight. Millie shakes her head, and no amount of pancake bribery will get her or JoJo to say anything else.
Biff knows he isn’t the smartest kid around, but it’s not nothing that’s got them so upset. Ms. Grenier runs the Extend-A-Care, which is the only program close by the MacGilligans can afford. If she’s keeping an eye on Raymond by having him hang around the Extend-A-Care, the odds of the girls getting away from him are nothing. Their mom can’t leave work early, and Biff can’t ditch school early (even if he wants to). And telling means maybe getting in trouble with Ms. Grenier, Raymond, their parents, or all three. The old man doesn’t like having his time wasted, and he doesn’t like people who can’t stand up for themselves.
So Biff takes a deep breath, pushes down the anger brewing in his gut, and says casually, “Okay. So it’s nothing. Want him to never do it again?”
JoJo and Millie eye him nervously.
“What you gonna do?” JoJo asks.
Biff shrugs. “Nothing.”
“No, really. What you gonna do?”
“Don’t do anything!” Millie shouts. “I told you! Nothing happened! You seen Raymond Grenier? He’s like gigantic! He’s even bigger than Dad! If he finds out we told—”
Biff is already putting the frying pan in the sink and headed for the door. “I told you I ain’t doing nothing. Go watch some Care Bears, okay? I’ll be back before Mom gets home.”
He makes for the door, but they chase after him.
“Where you going?” JoJo asks.
“Nowhere.”
“Can we come?” JoJo asks.
“No! Now scram, and don’t tell Mom I was gone.”
He slams the door behind him. JoJo and Millie open it again right away, of course, but by then, he’s vanished.
“Where’d he go?” He hears JoJo ask, and then he’s out of earshot.
Biff has never tried to do this while angry. It works well—he manages to hold it just long enough to get out of their eyesight, and they’re far enough away not to notice the blur effect he still hasn’t been able to fix. His adrenaline is thrumming and his heart is pounding, but his head feels clear, just filled with purpose.
He goes back to the Extend-A-Care. By this time, most of the kids are gone, and it’s starting to close down. Biff finds Raymond Grenier outside taking trash out to the Dumpster and starts following. No vanishing, this time; he’s not sure he can pull it off again so soon, and he can be unnoticeable just on his own. He hangs back, acts like he’s just wandering by, and when Raymond goes back in, he vanishes again and follows. Quietly—he doesn’t have a lot of faith in his vanish act yet, no matter how angry he is.
Raymond goes in and starts folding up chairs and dragging them off, a look of dull boredom on his face. He’s not really that big, just solid, with a greasy mullet and fuzz on his chin, and he hauls the folding chairs off four at a time.
Until now, Biff hasn’t really thought about what he’s going to do. But he can feel his brain wavering, and his image is starting to flicker and lurch like a ghost effect from a cheap movie; he won’t fool anyone. But as Raymond shuffles down the narrow hall, chairs under his arms, Biff gets an idea.
He’s never thought to do this before, but he knows it’ll be the easiest thing he’s ever done. The simplest thing someone can see, after all, is nothing.
Biff takes a good look around, marking the surroundings, and then plunges the hall into darkness. It’s a relief not to have to hold the vanish anymore.
He hears Raymond curse and drop one of the chairs. Then fumbling for the light switch. A click, but of course, nothing happens.
Biff waits.
Raymond Grenier curses some more, but he’s not afraid yet, just annoyed. He turns around to head back towards the play room, and Biff sticks out a leg. It gets him a chair to the face, which makes the darkness throb, but it works: Raymond falls headlong with a crash.
“Who’s there?” Raymond shouts. The warping of the darkness seems to have set him off.
Biff doesn’t answer, mostly because his nose is all white hot pain and his eyes are full of tears, and it’s taking all his concentration to keep the darkness up. It’s still throbbing, writhing in time to the pain in his face, which makes for a pretty nauseating effect. (In the back of his head, some part of him that’s not busy with pain swears he’ll get that fixed one day, learn to keep an image steady no matter what.)
“Don’t play games with me, you little shit, I know you’re there!” Raymond snarls. He sounds like he’s starting to get up, so Biff kicks him. In the dark, he can’t tell where it hits, but it connects good and solid, and Raymond Grenier grunts with pain.
“The hell is your problem? What do you want?” Raymond shouts, but an edge of fear is starting to come into his voice.
Biff doesn’t speak. Warm wetness is streaming over his face, forcing him to breathe through his mouth. If he speaks now, he won’t be able to keep the pain out of his voice and he’ll be sunk. But he’s good at staying quiet, holding still. His whole family is. Pain is just weakness leaving the body; he can wait it out.
He can’t keep his breathing from sounding loud, but that just seems to freak Raymond out more.
“The hell do you fucking want?” Raymond shrieks.
After a while, the pain ebbs to a manageable level, and Biff’s able to silence his breathing, but he still doesn’t speak. He listens to Raymond’s sharp, fast breathing, and he waits.
Until Raymond says, “Mom?”
“She’s not coming,” Biff says. He whispers so it won’t be so obvious that he’s a child, or that his nose is clogged.
“The fuck do you want, you little shithead? I’ll fucking kill you!” He hears Raymond move and something brushes his pant leg. Biff stamps and gets lucky—Raymond howls. Then, silent as a ghost in his thin sneakers, Biff pulls back so he won’t get grabbed.
“No you won’t,” he whispers. “You can’t see.”
Silence. Harsh breathing. Biff waits.
“What did you do to me?”
Biff says nothing.
“The lights. What’d you do to the lights?”
Biff smiles.
“The fuck do you want, you little freakshow?”
But Biff’s not afraid. This darkness is his, he owns it, and for once, he’s the one in control. He feels the blood drip down his lips, and he waits.
“What do you want?” The voice is quiet and broken now.
“Never touch them again,” Biff whispers.
“What? Who?”
“The kids. Never touch them again.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Biff’s face is still throbbing, and he lets it leak into the darkness again. It goes into a sickening swirl. “You never want to see again?”
“Okay! Okay! I’ll—I’ll leave them alone, I swear.”
Biff pulls the darkness back into shape. “You better. Or I’ll come back.”
Biff knows that really, he can’t turn someone blind forever. But at that moment, he feels like he could. Like if he had to, he would cut school for a week, just to follow Raymond Grenier around and keep him in the darkness for as long as necessary.
Biff vanishes—or at least, he hopes he vanishes, not like he can visually check he results—and he banishes the dark. Raymond Grenier is curled on his hands and knees on the floor, chairs scattered around him. When the lights—the everything—come back on, his head jerks up. He looks terrified, but he glances around, sees the hall, sees everything looking normal, and he starts to calm down. Biff can already tell he’s starting to dismiss it as a freak accident, brief insanity, nothing important.
Biff is short for his age, but he’s husky, and a lot stronger than people expect him to be. He kicks Raymond Grenier hard in the kidney, where he knows it hurts, and he hisses, “I’m watching.”
Then he leaves. His face still throbs, and the blood on his lips and chin are sticky, but he’s smiling. He feels good, adrenaline and blood humming through him. Everything feels calm and under control. He’s fixed it. Raymond Grenier won’t be bugging his sisters again.
Then he comes home and sees the car in the driveway, and that’s the end of that feeling. Is Mom early? Is he late? It doesn’t matter; he’s still in deep shit.
The front door bursts open and his mom storms out, frantic.
“Where have you been? You know never to leave your sisters alone, and—” She sees the blood on his face and shirt. She goes still, and her voice gets deadly quiet. “What did you do?”
Biff stares back at her, keeping his expression empty. “Nothing,” he says, and he pulls up the bottom of his shirt to wipe his face on.
She grabs his shoulders and shakes him. “You tell me what you did.”
Biff looks at her and he says, “Fell down the stairs.”
He should’ve known better. She slaps him. It’s not hard—his mom doesn’t hit—but it hurts in a worse way than the chair to the face did. He ducks his head behind his bangs, sniffs back blood, and pretends he didn’t feel it.
She wipes her hands on her apron. “Get inside and wash your face. We’ll discuss this when your father gets home.”
Biff shuffles past her, head down. In the TV room, Millie and JoJo are sitting in front of the TV with wide eyes, but it’s him they’re watching. The plates of pancake crumbs are still in front of them.
As he passes them, he gives them a thumbs-up and a smile. Then he hurries to his room to wait for the old man comes home.
--Continued in Part Two
no subject
Date: 2014-04-09 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-12 07:48 am (UTC)this had me on the edge of my seat.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-13 04:55 pm (UTC)Holy crap and you started at the total beginning too. Enjoy the chaos!
no subject
Date: 2018-05-13 05:12 pm (UTC)honestly i'm wondering if doing short stories like this might be the way to write down such a large and complex series of events.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-14 09:27 pm (UTC)If you're wanting to pursue such a thing yourself, I do recommend it! I know a lot of folks (including ourself) who were determined to create absolutely enormously complicated long-ass story as a first creative project, and a lot of folks I know just ran aground and keeled over trying. (And we ourself needed a few years break from Infinity Smashed when our reach far exceeded our grasp.) Breaking down into short stories is way more manageable an enterprise, and also has the bonus of being able to post little bits at a time, rather than waiting until you get a million pages all the way done.
--Rogan
no subject
Date: 2018-05-14 09:35 pm (UTC)*eyes the convoluted mess that is our hikago timeline*
no subject
Date: 2018-07-10 07:55 pm (UTC)I can't seem to get to the next part because it's on LJ. Do you have a DW link?
no subject
Date: 2018-07-11 04:10 pm (UTC)Whoops! I thought I fixed all the links when I moved from LJ to DW, but that one must've slipped through. Here's the new link; I'm fixing it in the post now.
--Rogan
no subject
Date: 2018-07-11 06:41 pm (UTC)