Chapter Text
"But with everybody watching us, our every move
We do have reputations
We keep it secret
Won't let them have it"
Pennsylvania was bigger than Dennis expected it to be. When he was young, he had thought of the Northeast as a compact collection of sprawling metropolises. But now, having made the drive from Pittsburgh to Philly and back a few times, he understood that there was just as much nothing here as there was in Nebraska. Nothing and trees that is.
Nothing and trees was all Dennis saw when he was driving back to Amy’s place. It was about an hour out of Pittsburgh, but when driving through backroads in the dark, an hour became an hour and a half if you were smart enough to slow down.
A driveway up to the farmhouse was long and obscured by the forest. This meant it was very easy to miss the turn if you weren’t paying attention, and after a day like day, Dennis certainly wasn’t.
“Denny, we’re here!” Amy shouted abruptly, giving Dennis just enough time to swerve into the driveway without knocking over the mailbox or running into a tree trunk.
The speed of the turn made baby Theo start crying. Dennis parked the car and picked him up from his carseat.
“I know Theo, I know,” he said, rocking the baby back and forth, “It was just a sharp turn, it’s ok now.”
“Here, let me take him,” Amy offered, “You look exhausted. We should get inside.”
Theo settled down quickly once he was in his moms touch. Dennis was always good with kids, but he didn’t think he had the magic baby touch that some people in the ER seemed to have. There were a few doctors and nurses who could quiet a baby down in mere seconds, but Dennis just had to deal with the screaming.
He stepped wearily out the driver's seat, his feet heavy as lead. Almost immediately, he felt the sharp force of something sinking its jaws into the back of his neck. Dennis slapped his hand where he felt the bite and drew it back to see what had gotten him.
In his palm laid a small, mangled speck of black flesh soaked in blood (which he presumed to be his own). He wiped its corpse against his pant leg and drew his hand back to his neck to see what kind of damage it had done. It stung as soon as he touched, and a large, throbbing welt had already formed at the base of his skull.
As beautiful as forests were, you always had to be on the lookout for the vampires that infested him. Broken Bow never had enough trees to attract those kinds of predators. The prairies had their own beasts of course: ticks, spiders, things like that, but nothing with wings. Dennis always took a sort of comfort in that. You could avoid these bugs just by knowing where they liked to hang out; don’t walk in the long grass or hang about near still water. Insects that could fly on the other hand, they could chase you from city to city and you’d have no means of escaping them.
Before he came to Pittsburgh, Dennis’s only experience with forests this thick were on trips with his uncle to West Virginia. Jack Henry Whitaker was about a decade older than Dennis’s old man. He was a devout catholic and the owner of a large coal mine about an hour north of Charleston (a combination which Dennis sometimes thought was a little ironic).
Jack had no children of his own, but was very involved in Dennis’s and his brothers’ lives, oftentimes more so than their own father. He had a sort of coming of age ritual he liked to do with the boys. The summer after their 12th birthday, he’d drive them up to Chestnut Hill, the village closest to his mine, and introduce them to the world of “real work”, in hopes of turning these wayward, wily boys into hardworking men.
Being the youngest, Dennis watched three of his brothers make the trip and come back different, older. He had always been the scrawniest and the shyest of his siblings, so he always longed for the day he would get to hop into a car with his uncle and toughen up into a real man. When that day finally came, Dennis could barely contain his excitement.
He had carefully packed his bags the night before and woke up at the crack of dawn to wait for his uncle to pick him up. When he saw the car coming over the horizon he sprung up from his rocking chair and ran out into the road. He could barely keep his balance with all the luggage he was carrying, but nothing was going to stop him from getting to uncle Jackdy.
Jack slammed on the brakes when he saw the boy waving maniacially at him in the middle of the road.
“Woah there, Denny boy,” he said, getting out of the car, “Watcha doin’ out here so early. I darn near ran you over.”
“I’m sorry uncle Jackdy. I know you said to wait in the house but when I saw you I couldn’t stop myself from running over. I just can’t wait to come see your place.”
“That’s alright Denny, I’m excited to have you too. But you ought to calm yourself down there dude. You ain’t a little boy anymore, you need to grow up a bit huh. But don’t worry, I’ll help you with that this summer. Come on, hop in the car and we can head off a bit early.”
…
As he stumbled up the steps to Amy’s place, he remembered a piece of wisdom his grandfather gave him on the drive up to West Virginia
“There’s a whole lot of different beasts you got to look out for in these woods, but blackflies, well they must be the servants of Satan himself.”
The way Jackie told it, there were a few lesser demons of the Appalachian woods. There were the mosquitoes of course, who were stealthy little buggers. They hunted their prey quickly and efficiently, and they were small enough to take a drink out of you and get away unnoticed. Mosquitoes though, for all the disease and death they caused, were not designed to be cruel. Their bite was nothing but a poke. They’d stick their nose into you, take a few drops of blood, release an anticoagulant, maybe an analgesic, then go about their day. You might not even feel it at first.
Deerflies on the other hand, as well as their even larger counterparts, horseflies, were savage brutes. Unlike mosquitoes, these monsters’ mouths were made to cause as much damage as possible. Made up of two sharp springs, its jaws would slice through your skin like a pair of scissors, taking a chunk of flesh and a good serving of blood with them. At least they had the decency to be easy to kill though. Their size made them hard to miss, and slow enough that you could squash their murderous souls between your hands without much of a struggle.
And then there were blackflies, which had the size and stealth of mosquitoes but the same vicious jaws as deerflies and horseflies.
His uncle had told him. “They offer you neither mercy nor justice. They don’t care one bit for your humanity or about the pain that they cause. In fact, they revel in it. You cannot run from them, you cannot hide, you cannot even notice their impending attack until they’ve launched it. And once they’ve taken your flesh and blood, they are gone. There is no law you can enforce on them, no revenge you can enact, nothing. There is nothing right about these creatures, they are evil in its purest form.”
Dennis had thought Jackie was being quite melodramatic at the time, but now, as he scratched his aching neck, he was inclined to agree.
Amy pulled out a chair for him in the dining room.
“Here, take a seat before you pass out,” she said, “How was work today?”
“Honestly, it was a lot. Apparently it always is on the 4th of July. One of our frequent flyers, Louie, he um… died today, and I was his doctor, so that was really hard. But overall I think it was ok. I mean, I literally just became a doctor so I didn’t have very high hopes, but I think I might actually be getting the hang of this. Oh! Robby also asked me to house-sit for him, he’s going on some crazy sabbatical, so at least I know someone trusts me. I think I might have hurt Trinity’s feelings, I’ll have to check in on her…”
“That's nice!” Amy interrupted, before Dennis lost himself in his ramble, “You should probably stay the night though, before you head over to Robby’s place.”
“Yeah I think you’re right. I’ll help get little Theo here into bed and then park myself in the spare room if that’s alright.”
Amy smiled awkwardly at that. Dennis got the sense something he had said offended her. Was it when he said he was moving to Robby’s place? Something about Trinity maybe? It was like that a lot with Amy. She never got mad or fought with him, but Dennis often felt like he was getting something wrong with her. Like there was something she wanted from him that he wasn’t giving her. Or maybe his exhausted brain was just making him see things that weren’t there.
“Uhm, how long are you house-sitting for,” Amy asked.
“Probably around three months,” Dennis said, “A lot of people in the hospital are worried that Robby’s taking off for good, but I think that’s just talk, at least I hope it is.”
“Well I hope so too. Hey, me and Theo are going up for Christmas to my sister’s place in Vermont. I was wondering if maybe you want to join us, you know, if you’re not still house sitting then.
Dennis thought that was a bit odd. He didn’t really see himself as the kind of person you’d take to meet your family. But Amy was a good friend, maybe she just wanted to spend time with him.
“Um… yeah, I’ll think about it,” he stammered.
“Well you should. Vermont is absolutely gorgeous in the winter.”
…
“You know it’s prettier up here in the winter,” Jackie said as they drove up Chestnut Hill’s main street.
“The snow dresses it up nicely. But now, now is prime work season. Beautiful as it is, it's hard to mine coal in a blizzard.”
Dennis was only half listening to what his uncle was saying. He thought the place was already quite beautiful right now. In his whole life he had never seen so many trees, or hills for that matter. Nebraska had its charms, but it was pretty monotonous as far as the terrain went.
Jackie pulled in next to an old candy shop and got out of the car.
“C’mon, let me get you a little treat before I put you to work.”
The inside of the store looked like something out of the pioneer village recreations Dennis had gone on field trips to as a kid. The dusty wooden shelves were lined with butterscotch and cookies and multicoloured lollipops. Dennis’s eyes widened as he took in all of the sweets he could get.
“Go, run wild,” his uncle laughed.
Dennis took off and began to scour the aisles, looking for the perfect treat. He eventually settled on a jar of gummy candies in the back corner of the store.
“Those ones are my favourite too,” a voice called from behind him.
Dennis turned around. The voice belonged to a lanky boy around his age with wild blonde hair and buck teeth.
“Hi I’m Rodney,” the boy said, “but you can call me Rod. What’s your name, I’ve never seen you ‘round here.”
“Me, I’m Dennis. This is my first time coming here. I’m with my uncle over there. He owns a coal mine somewhere around here.”
“Ah, so you’re the big man’s nephew,” Rodney laughed, “I guess I should start bowing to you then.”
“What? No! Why would you do that,” Dennis squealed.
“C’mon, I'm just kidding. Here, why don’t you let me show you around town.”
“Oh, I don’t think I can…”
“Denny!” Jack shouted, “Get over here.”
Rodney hung his head low.
“But uncle Jackie I made a new friend,” Dennis pleaded.
“Hey, hey, hey,” uncle Jack said, ushering Dennis to the other side of the store, “Look, I want you to stay away from that boy for a little while, alright.”
“But why?”
“Well, word around town is that he’s a queer, and I don’t know if I want you hanging around that sort.”
“What does that mean uncle Jackie?” Dennis asked.
“It means he’s fallen in with the devil,” a voice said from behind them.
Dennis looked up. The man stared down at him with steely grey eyes. He was taller and greyer than anyone he had ever seen before. Dennis had overheard his uncle greeting the man as Zedekiah. An appropriately biblical sounding name for someone who seemed so intertwined with god.
Dennis had always been taught to trust the prophets, to follow the ones who speak the word of lord. So even though Dennis felt a twinge of fear looking at this man’s battered face, he trusted that it was the fear of God calling him to him.
“It’s pure evil I’ll tell you, that’s what it is. The homosexuals, they twist the gifts of god for their own carnal desires, destroy all that is holy inside them. Sick bastards they are, children of the devil. There is nothing right about them.”
Dennis’s heart beat hard as he listened to Zedekiah. The lights in the shop began to flickered and fly buzzed idly around his face. He didn’t care, he was too engrossed in the man’s words to focus on anything else. Jack placed a hand on his shoulder, knocking him out of his trance.
“Well that’s a little bit theatrical, don’t you think Zed. Denny and I better get going now. We’ll see you later.”
“I still don’t know what a homosexual is,” Dennis muttered.
“Thats not for you to know Denny, not yet.”
But as he watched Rodney shuffle ashamedly out of the store, he didn’t see the evil that Zedekiah was talking about. He saw a boy like him, who was scared and kind and just wanted a friend. And as much as he knew he shouldn’t be, he was drawn to him, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to avoid him all summer.
…
Dennis turned off the light in the nursery. “Sweet dreams, little guy,” he whispered.
Amy ushered him out of the room, “All right. We better get you to bed before you drop dead right here.”
Dennis nodded in agreement. Amy took his hand and stared at him intently with her soft blue eyes.
“You, I’m really thankful for everything you’ve done for me these past few months. I don’t know how we would have gotten through Teddy’s death without you. For a while I thought I’d never go outside or talk to anyone again, but I think I’m starting to get better, thanks to you.”
“It’s really no trouble at all. You’re my friend Amy,” Dennis said, feeling a little nervous.
And then she kissed him.
The first thing Dennis felt was shock. He didn’t see this coming at all. Amy was one of his best friends and they were happy that way. They were just two farm kids against the world and that’s all they needed to be. Why would Amy kiss him? They weren’t in love.
The second thing Dennis felt was guilt, because how could he have not seen this coming. Dennis was the person Amy relied on at the worst moments of her life. He had been there as she rebuilt her life and learned love again. This was Amy going out on a limb and trying to connect with someone after losing her favourite person in the world
The third thing Dennis felt was a visceral, crushing sadness, because although he loved Amy deeply as a friend, he couldn’t reciprocate her feelings at all. It wasn’t that Amy wasn’t an amazing woman, because she was. But Dennis had never felt that way about a woman, and he wasn’t sure if he was even capable of it. Dennis felt ashamed, as he so often did about this part of himself. He was going to crush this poor woman’s already broken heart because he wasn’t able to love like a normal person.
“I’m sorry,” Dennis muttered, pulling away from her. “I…I don’t think this is a…I can’t do this.”
Amy’s eyes widened as she realized how uncomfortable he was.
“I’m… I’m so sorry Dennis, I shouldn’t have done that,” she pleaded, “it’s too soon, I..I shouldn’t start dating again, I know that, I know that.”
“No, it’s not that,” Dennis said, “It’s just that I…”
Truthfully, Dennis didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, why he couldn’t love her. Anything he could say to Amy would hurt her. All that she wanted was to try and love again, to be loved, and nothing that Dennis couldn’t tell her would change the fact that he was taking that chance away. So, like the coward that he was, he ran away.
“...I…I… I have to go, Amy.”
He turned away from her and scampered down the stairs. Amy begged him to come back, to talk to her. But Dennis didn’t see how he could.
“I’m sorry Amy… I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” He repeated as he left the house.
This was wrong. He knew this was wrong, but he didn’t know what else to do. It was better for Amy if he didn’t string her along, let her pretend she was going to have something he couldn’t give her. Or maybe it was just easier for him, not having to explain to Amy what was wrong with him, not having to face the shame of who he was. It was too late now to go back though. He was already in the car, backing out of the driveway.
He didn’t dare look back.
…
As he snuck out of his uncle’s house just after, he kept his eyes focused forward. He didn’t dare look back.
It had been a month since he’d arrived in Chestnut Hill. June had come and gone, and, much to his uncle’s credit, he’d learned a lot. For the first time in his life Dennis felt like he might actually grow into a good, honest man.
But there was one thing he couldn’t do, and that was to stay away from Rodney. In his first weeks here he had tried to, and so had Rod. But they just kept running into each other, and they were just so drawn to one another in a way that neither of them could really explain, so eventually, they just stopped trying.
That was why Dennis was here, bushwhacking his way through the darkness, with nothing but a flashlight and the clothes on his back. He was going to the fort that Rodney had built in the woods just off Lincoln street. This was where they spent most of their time together. It was hidden and quiet, so there wasn’t any fear of being caught. It wasn’t perfect of course. Rodney's architectural skills left quite a bit to be desired, and the bugs in the woods were nearly unbearable.
Especially at night, Dennis thought, as he smacked a blackfly trying to take a bite out his collarbone.
But it was what they had, so they made it work.
Tomorrow it would be the 4th of July, which, according to Rod, was a big deal in Chestnut Hill. Apparently, every year the Town Council would hold a big fair on Main Street which would draw nearly the entire village downtown. It wasn’t something that Dennis and Rod would ever be able to go to, at least not together. But it meant that the rest of Chestnut Hill would be vacated, and that they would have the reign of the place.
The last they spoke, Rod told Dennis that he had an adventure planned for today. Dennis didn’t really know what to expect from that, and to be honest he was a little bit scared. But uncle Jack had brought him here so he could learn to be brave, to take risks, and that was what he was going to do.
…
Dennis kept nodding off as he drove along the narrow gravel road. He thought about pulling off, and he’d seen enough bad accidents caused by people falling asleep at the wheel to know that is what he should be doing, but his mind seemed committed to making exclusively bad decisions right now.
Maybe he was just too exhausted to think logically. Of course that would mean he was far too exhausted to drive, but he wasn’t really in the state to be making those sorts of connections.
Dennis watched the road in front of him half-heartedly, not that he could see much anyways. There were never streetlights on backroads like this one, just not enough people driving on them to justify the cost of maintaining them. But as black spots began to cloud his field of vision, he really wished there were some.
As he lulled in and out of awareness, he could hear the gentle thwack-thwack of bugs hitting the windshield. It wasn’t anything new, this was the height of blackfly season after all. However, as Dennis drove along the makeshift highway, the tempo of the thwack-thwacks slowly accelerated, and he realized that the black spots in front of him were not holes in his vision, they were swarms, and they were growing.
Dennis tried to stop the car, but he couldn’t will his foot to reach for the brakes. By now, the blackflies had completely surrounded him, to the point where he couldn’t see anything past his dashboard. Dennis clutched the steering wheel, white knuckled, just praying that the swarm would clear before he hit something.
To his horror, a figure emerged in front of him. It was human-ish, but not quite. There was something wrong with it, it was ghostly, almost immaterial. It didn’t matter, Dennis didn’t have time to make sense of what was happening. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t stop, he couldn’t see anything, so he did the only thing he could.
He swerved.