Nico Gray (Draft)

A Chapter by Deco

Twilight sat fading rapidly just beneath the ether that evening. The warning of the day’s end and the inevitable arrival of darkness came with the pale deluge of winter. The snowfall was relentless and, driven by self-preservation, Nicholas had evaded the man at the threshold of his bedroom door and had jumped through a second-story window onto the fading day. It was an escape.

He’d run for what seemed a mile before he caught wind, before he realized that he’d made the jump barefooted. Not good, he’d thought as he came to a stop to catch a breath. But the alternative was worse. Evidence of that came as cold wind seeped through the t-shirt he wore and seemed to, like vultures, scavenge the wounds left on his back in the wake of his foster father’s whip. The f*****g b*****d.

He pushed forward, not entirely sure whether his shoe-less trek in the snow was an advance towards a better day. Towards the inevitable, eventual all-rightness that the good part about being at rock-bottom is that the only way to go from there up seems to...with such certainty, advertise. He wasn’t so sure of it. Perhaps that ship had sailed the day he watched his father kill his mother. And if this, his mare's nest, was what they considered rock bottom he wasn’t sure which way was up or how he was to ascend to the proverbial ether of milk and honey. He was sure only that he had to make haste in his advance. Questions of how and why this was happening he pushed out of his mind for now. For now. He ran.

His move forward grew darker now, daylight fading rapidly under the force of the pale deluge. At this point, it was evident he didn’t have a pursuer, and it hadn’t been the case, at least not after he’d made the jump, yet he checked his back with every step. And both his flanks. There was no one. Nothing. The feeling of a pursuer loomed as he came to a snow-coated clearing. Looking around, though the visibility was poor, he could see the surrounding woods had inevitably succumbed to the cold grasp of winter. Dead trees sprang up from the frozen, snow-covered soil appeared as objects of baseless fear guarding the crops of an arid crop field. Or maybe they were more like figures of misery, eerie hunters of dreamscapes; contorters of pale dreams to scarlet night terrors. He felt a chill of it that came disconcertingly… “Just dead trees,” he whispered to himself. “Just dead trees. The b*****d is the boogeyman.”

When he stopped again, this time facing towards whence he’d come, still wary of his phantom pursuer, he held fast to his sides: the parts where supposed his lungs would be, wincing, his rapid panting producing clumps of breath that seemed to linger longer than he appreciated. He thought he surely should be grabbing at his feet, instead. The thought sends a wary grin across his face. He couldn’t feel them. Nor could he feel his hands. In any case, he reached for his pajama bottoms, or rather unraveled the folds in them, pulled them down to cover his feet and tied a knot in them one after the other.

As he turned onward he saw something in the distance, a pair of dim glows, westward and advancing, and he knew what they were. Headlight. They cut through the falling snow starkly, and at the same time seemed to fade behind the white veil for seconds at a time. And so whoever sat at the helm made advance less hastily. That’s a chance he thought, making final adjustments to his knotted shoes. He ran. His eyes fixed on the advancing car all the time as if there was a chance it would suddenly disappear. The thought didn’t help the fact that so far he hadn’t seen another pair of a headlight in either direction. He had to at least flag this one down.

He hit the county road with about twenty or thirty feet between the car and himself. He jumped and waved and yelled to get the driver’s attention. But the car didn’t stop when it reached him, and for the first time it occurred to him that things could turn out badly as he stood with both hands in the air--still looking where the car had come from--brandishing a puzzled look--and seemingly as if he’d frozen. “If there’s a god he must hate me, doesn’t he?” he moaned as he turned his head to watch salvation inevitably leave him behind.

But there was hope. And it came in the form of the pair of brake lights which appeared to belong to a beast in the night with a thirst for blood as they stood aglow. A pang of fright glided through him, reminiscent of his first experience, canine-wise. Gonzo! He thought. A Labrador retriever that had nearly killed him at age ten when he'd tried to retrieve a ball from the neighbor’s yard. And so, of course, a red-eye beast in the night would be of the canine lineage, if in any moment he'd imagine a thing to be. He ran.

When he reached the car the passenger side window was rolled down, a seemingly nervous woman peering out into the night to glimpse the stranger for whom she’d stopped. Her pair of eyes were a perfect Majorelle blue; sparkling Tiffany sapphires, carrying in them what seemed to him the hallmark of maternity. The same kind that had been so welcoming on his mother’s face the day Gonzo nearly killed him. But there too was something else, a glitter of a malady hitherto held in check. Or maybe she’s just nervous; I would be too. He convinced himself.

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