Available Darkness Season 2

life as it unspooled in her mind like an open pit filled with rotting bodies.
    Abigail let go of Karen, sending her burnt, and now empty, body falling back to the floor. Abigail stumbled backward, barely aware of her surroundings, a prisoner of memories spilling in front of her.
    Just a few more minutes. It’ll be over soon , she told herself.
    The knot at the back of Abigail’s neck eased in a rare moment of happiness — a light in the darkness, as memory turned to the birth of Karen’s son, Kyle.
    Sure, he was an accident with her scumbag boyfriend Marcus but her heart melted the moment she saw him, and was a puddle as she held his eight pounds and two ounces in her arm’s cradle. Karen fell … in love; felt true love for the first time ever. The unfeigned, unmitigated love of parent for child. A pure love, unlike anything her parents had ever given to her.
    Karen was, for the first time in her life, happy.
    In that moment, Abigail felt the woman’s joy, and wanted to slow the memories of Karen and her baby boy so she could live in them longer. But the sun was quick to set on Karen McKenna’s flickering joy.
    It started with Marcus. Karen thought she could make something of a “normal” life with him, scumbag or no. But other than her beautiful baby boy, Marcus only brought misery, mostly through drugs — painkillers first, meth later — and too many lies. Marcus wanted nothing to do with Kyle, seeing his son only as a burden, no different from how her own father saw her.
    One day, a full darkness eclipsed her sun, then held its black forever in place. Karen was passed out from a night of too much partying with Marcus. When she woke, Kyle was in his bed, blue and dead.
    She had no idea what happened. Her father sent some men in suits over, said they’d take care of everything. They took Kyle away, reassuring her that all would be OK. How the hell can it ever be OK? Kyle, the only good thing in her life, the only good thing she’d ever done, was dead.
    Her father suspected Marcus — who had left early that morning, a rarity for him to be awake, let alone gone before noon — had killed Kyle. Marcus disappeared, and the police immediately turned their attention to Karen.
    She spun into the deepest depression, sick with the knowledge that she was responsible for her son’s death. Once arrested, Karen hoped for death. But her father would never allow it. He bought off everyone he could to ensure his daughter would never see the inside a prison.
    But Daddy hadn’t been able to keep her out of the prison of her own making, and she descended into drugs, partying, and bad relationships, all trying to fill a void which could never be filled.
    Now, her pain was finally over.
    Memory crashed into the present and left Abigail shaking in brutal sobs on the floor. She was fed, and her body again whole. But everything else felt wrong.
    Larry moved toward her, his hands landing softly on her shoulders as he scooped her up from the floor. “Come on, Abi, I’ll take you home.”
    He carried her from the house like a rag doll.
    “We were wrong, Larry,” Abigail wept, “We were wrong.”

    **

    Abigail said nothing on the long ride back to Washington, sitting in the front seat, trying not to see the occasional flash of memories she’d stolen along with Karen’s life. Larry tried talking to her, tried to apologize, tried to comfort her, but every time he opened his mouth, it felt like an icy blade beneath her overheated skin.
    “Please,” she said, retreating into a fetal ball in the front seat.
    Abigail wished she could sit in the back, but that’s where “the body” was, and Larry had yet to dump it. Karen’s life had been mostly pain, with a rare spark of joy. Now she was a battery of memory in a thief’s head, with nothing left of who she was, except for the charred remains that would soon be buried in the woods never to be found, much less identified.
    Abigail let tears wash her cheeks, believing at first she was crying for Karen. And though she was, there was something else there, too. The little girl who could never grow older was also crying for yet one more piece of herself — forever lost to the creeping darkness.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 3 — Larry

    Larry woke an hour before the sun was due to go down.
    Being on Abigail’s schedule meant he only had a few hours in the morning and another few in the early evening to himself. He’d always been a night person, so the adjustment to sleeping through