Of Fathers and Sons
By Koinaka
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
-Macbeth, Act IV, scene 1, lines 44-45
Chapter Two
It wasn't until two weeks before his tenth birthday that Kurt thought about his dad being different again.
His dad was on a business trip, the first one that he'd taken in months, and he wasn't due home for another two days after which they would be leaving for a long needed vacation to Disney World. That left the two of them—Kurt and his mom—to work at the shop while he was gone.
Now, normally Kurt loved to work at the shop, but with Disney World looming over him, he could scarcely sit still, so he spent the better part of the day bouncing around and asking his mom—over and over again—when his dad was going to be home.
"In two days," his mom told him each time, but each time her tone became closer and closer to what Kurt called her "no nonsense tone."
When it did, finally, become her "no nonsense tone," Kurt stopped asking and instead slouched sullenly down on the couch in the office, the map of the Magic Kingdom spread in front of him. The map had come in their vacation planning guide, and Kurt had done little else but look at it for days. Most of the time, he wanted to look at it, but on this day, he was feeling particularly restless, so it went mostly untouched.
He missed his dad. He had only been gone a week, but everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. It started off with an electrical storm that left them without power for nearly a day and had gone downhill from there. Plus, his mom seemed really worried about something, and every night since that electrical storm, she spent hours on the phone when she thought Kurt wasn't listening talking to someone named Bobby. When she wasn't on the phone, she was staring at the window. One time, Kurt had even caught her crying. She had denied it, but Kurt hadn't believed her.
He flipped through the channels on the small TV his dad kept in the office, but something must have been wrong with it because there was just static on every channel. Next he tried his dad's computer, but the same thing happened. There was another computer out front, but that was strictly for business. The one in his office was for Kurt and his mom to use when they were there. He dug his iPod out from his pants pocket only to discover that it, too, was messed up. He ended up just lying on the couch and staring up at the ceiling until he got hungry.
There was a pizza place next door where he always ate lunch at when he was at the shop. Now that he was nearly ten, he was allowed to walk over there—and stay inside the entire time!—alone. His mom waved him away, too distracted by a customer complaining on the phone to give him the usual warnings.
The normally bustling shop was nearly empty. Besides the workers, there was only one other customer there. Kurt wouldn't have even taken a second look at the customer if it hadn't been for his eyes. He had yellow eyes. Not just the normal part of his eye, though, but all of it. At least that's what Kurt thought, but when he turned and looked again, the man's eyes were normal. He shrugged it off and sat down at his normal table.
"Hey kid," Lucy called. "Want the usual?"
Kurt nodded eagerly. Lucy made the best veggie pizza he'd ever had. Not that he'd had much, but still it was pretty good.
"Hello Kurt."
Surprised, Kurt spun around to where the man was sitting. "How'd you know my name?" he asked suspiciously.
The man smiled. It was a friendly sort of smile but it made Kurt feel funny. It made him feel cold all over—like he'd never be happy again. Like the dementors made Harry Potter feel. "Oh, I know all about you. Like that your birthday is coming up. Me and your daddy are real close. Best friends, you might even say."
Kurt relaxed at once. Anyone who was friends with his dad couldn't be too bad—even if he made Kurt feel weird. The man continued to smile. "I was hoping you might give your daddy a message for me."
"Sure," Kurt said.
He gave messages to his dad all the time when he worked at the shop. Hummel Tire and Lube was the only mechanics shop in their home town of Dell Rapids, South Dakota, so his dad had tons of customers, and he considered nearly all of them his friends. Before the man could give him the message though, Lucy brought over his drink and a basket of bread-sticks for him to eat while waiting on the pizza.
Kurt loved Lucy. Her hair was fuchsia, and her nose was pierced twice. She was in college, but she didn't talk to him like he was a little kid. On the rare occasions that his parents went out, Lucy would come over and babysit him.
"So, word on the street is that you and yours are goin' to Disney World. You excited?" Lucy asked, setting Kurt's plate down in front of him and then plopping down in the empty chair across from him.
He nodded again. "As soon as my dad comes home, we're going to leave. We have to drive all the way there 'cause my dad's afraid of airplanes. Mom says it'll take hours and hours, but that's okay."
They talked about Disney World for a few more minutes before she had to go back to work and Kurt had to go back to the shop.
He didn't think anything more about the yellow-eyed man until his mom was tucking him into bed that night.
"I saw one of dad's friends today," he told her around a yawn. "At the pizza place. He said he had a message for him, but he never gave it to me. Guess it wasn't too important."
She gave him a fond smile and smoothed the hair away from his before dropping a soft kiss there. "Oh really? Who was it?"
"Dunno. He didn't tell me his name. He knew mine though."
His mom was quiet for a minute. "Did he?"
Kurt nodded and moved over so his mom could climb in beside him for their nightly chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
"Well, whatever he wanted must not have been very important. Otherwise, he wouldn't have forgotten to tell you. Now, then, let's see where we were…"
He liked it well enough when his dad read to him, but he loved it when it was his mom's turn. She always did all of the voices, and he especially loved how she did Hermione. The chapter was over much too soon, and then Kurt was left with the prospect of going to sleep alone. It was one of the few rules he had to follow. He wasn't allowed in his mom and dad's room for any reason even to sleep when he had a nightmare or his dad wasn't home, because that was their personal space. Most of the time he didn't care about that rule, but that night he didn't want to be alone.
"Can I sleep with you tonight?"
His mom sighed. "You know the rules, kiddo."
"Yeah. Okay. Can the light stay on then?"
Kurt had never been afraid of the dark—even when he was a little kid, and he definitely wasn't a little kid now. He was nearly ten, but he really, really, didn't want to be in the dark that night. Almost as much as he didn't want to be alone.
His mom gave him a shrewd look. "What's all this about?"
He shrugged. "I just…don't feel right."
"Don't feel right," she echoed in an odd voice. "Right how?"
Another shrug. "Like how I felt before when I was talking to Dad's friend. You know, the man with the yellow eyes."
The heavy hardcover version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix slipped from his mom's hand and clattered to the ground, startling him. When he looked up at his mom, her face was pale.
"What. Did. You. Say?" she asked him slowly, enunciating each word until they sounded like separate sentences.
"Dad's friend. The one who wanted me to give him a message. He had yellow eyes. Or I think he did."
There was a loud crash in the living room and another in the guest room.
His mom spun around, her eyes darting around the room as if she expected there to be another person in the room. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of his bed. When he let out a whimper of pain, she covered his mouth up with her hand.
"I need you to listen to me, and do exactly what I say. Can you do that? Nod your head if you understand."
Kurt nodded. His heart was thudding painfully in his chest.
"When I let go of you, I need you to run to my bedroom. Don't look back, and don't stop. Now, when you get inside, you're going to see a door. You open that door, and go into that room. Once you're in, close it. You'll have to pull really hard because it's heavy. Don't leave that room, no matter what you hear, baby. You understand?"
He nodded again.
She let him go and tucked something into the pocket of his pajamas as she pulled something from her socks. It was a knife, but not like a normal knife. He stared at it for a minute, but then took off down the hallway at a run. The door was there just like she said, but it wasn't wooden like a real door. It was made of some kind of metal. It was heavy, but with a little bit of work he managed to close it. There was a spinning handle on the other side that spun automatically when he closed it.
No sooner had he closed the door did the screaming start.
He tried to open it back, even though his mom had told him not to, but it wouldn't budge. He banged on it, pounded on it, until his fists were bleeding, screaming and crying as he did, but nothing happened. No one could hear him, not over his mom's screams. They went on for what felt like hours until they suddenly stopped—cut off abruptly mid-scream.
Exhausted and terrified, Kurt sank down onto the floor and slumped against the door. That was when he remembered that his mom had put something into his pocket.
It was her cell phone.
He opened it with one hand while trying to wipe his tears off of his face with the other. His dad's number was the first on her contact list, but there was no answer. He called it over and over again, but each time it just rang and rang until it went to voicemail.
He tried one last time, and this time someone did answer on the first ring. "Mollie? This better be important, we're in the middle of a hunt!"
The voice was all wrong. It wasn't his dad, and he really, really, really wanted to talk to his dad. "Daddy," he said finally, his voice thick with tears, "I need to talk to my daddy."
He could hear some shuffling on the other side of the receiver, and then someone else spoke into the phone.
"Kurt, is that you?"
The moment he heard his dad's voice, he dissolved into hysterics. He tried to tell him what was wrong, what had happened, but all he could do was sob, "Daddy, daddy, daddy" over and over again. It had been a long time since he had called his dad daddy because he was getting older—he was almost ten now—and only little kids did that but right then he didn't care.
"Hey now, buddy, what's this? What's wrong? Where's your mom? Come on, are you okay?"
Kurt shook his head, but then, after realizing that his dad couldn't see him, he opened his mouth and told him everything that had happened. He was nearly finished telling him when something banged on the door that he was leaning against. He shrieked and scurried across the room until he was underneath some kind of table. He pulled his legs against him and hugged them as tight as he could.
"—Kurt, can you hear me? Answer me, damn it!"
"Yeah."
"Okay, good. I'm on my way back right now, but it'll take me a little while to get there. I'm going to call a friend of mine over to come help you. He'll look after you until I can get there. Just, whatever you do, stay where you are until he gets there. His name is Bobby." There was a long pause. "I love you, Kurt. I promise, when this is over, that everything'll be different."