DARK: A Creepy Collection Read online

  “I said play the Darkness!” he shouts. “You’re not doing it. Do it. Play the Darkness.”

  He closes his eyes.

  Ashley clears her mind and pours herself back into the music, her fingers pounding and dancing and jamming and sliding across the keys, up and down, down and up the length of the piano.

  The tones are deep and melodic and full of passion, minor keys and sharps - growing, building into staccato thrusts within a moody crescendo.

  She is now lost in the flow, all thoughts of cyanide and revenge and personal safety and Mom replaced with the Darkness.

  After a few minutes, Silage places his hands gently on her shoulders, his hot rough palms touching her exposed skin.

  “Okay. Go now.”

  Ashley stops playing. She shakes herself out of the stupor, the spell broken. Confusion rips through her mind.

  She was certain she would be raped or killed when her cyanide plot failed, but now he’s letting her go.

  “Come back. Please,” he pleads. “Tomorrow. And play for me some more.”

  Ashley nods, her eyes wide, and quickly slips out the way she came in.

  She doesn’t remember the walk back to her house, entering the front door, or climbing the stairs to bed.

  #

  Ashley is awakened by her laptop.

  DING –

  LazyDazy is ONLINE

  LazyDazy: U there, Ash?

  Ashley rubs the grit out of her eyes and squints in the morning light. She’s slept all day and all night.

  She can taste her breath – like cardboard. She’s still wearing her dress. Stiff and sore, she reaches to her night stand – her lifeline is never far out of reach – and sits up to type.

  Ashes2Ashes: Yes.

  LazyDazy: What’s going on? I haven’t heard from you except for the weird email you sent me last night.

  Ashley wonders what email she’s talking about and checks her SENT folder. She reads the email she doesn’t remember sending. Time stamp 12:02 a.m.

  laze,

  it’s the darkness

  it’s me

  i’m to blame it’s all me

  the darknessssssssss

  No sig line. Unless that last line is the sig line.

  Ashley reads it over three times, then goes back to the instant message.

  Ashes2Ashes: Sorry, I don’t remember sending that. Things are really messed up right now. I’m messed up.

  LazyDazy: What happened? Has Tanner taken care of JS?

  Ashley tells her everything – the dead man at Silage’s, Silage peeping in her windows, her mother. Her purchase of cyanide online.

  The only thing she leaves out is the music. She can’t explain the music.

  The Darkness.

  LazyDazy: O. M. G. I am so sorry, Ash. I don’t even know what 2 say.

  Ashes2Ashes: There’s nothing 2 say. It is what it is.

  LazyDazy: What are U going 2 do?

  Ashes2Ashes: I don’t know. I’ll talk 2 U later.

  LazyDazy: Okay. Let me know if U need anything.

  BLIP BLIP –

  LazyDazy is OFFLINE.

  #

  The grandmother Ashley hardly knows should arrive sometime today. Ashley sits in the kitchen eating a bowl of dry cereal – the milk’s gone bad.

  She can’t stand this house anymore. Too many memories. Too silent. And too close to Silage Antiques.

  And he’s expecting her today.

  What’s he going to do if she doesn’t show up?

  She can’t go on like this.

  She won’t be his captive.

  She decides this may the opportunity she needs to put an end to this. The invitation into his lair is a way to get in - if she’s prepared, she can make it worth it. She won’t even have to sneak in, she can just waltz right in and –

  - and what?

  Ashley thinks. She looks around the kitchen. A big knife is too obvious, and the thought of spilling blood sickens her – besides, he’s shown he knows how to use a knife himself, so she’d be toast if he disarmed her.

  No, she needs something else. Something he could never use against her.

  Her only tool, her only weapon is inside her.

  She makes her decision.

  #

  Ashley knocks on the door of Silage Antiques. She’s dressed in her normal attire of jeans and sweatshirt. No need to dress up – it’s not her body he wants – it’s her soul.

  He opens the door, wearing his usual greasy overalls over a wife-beater. She can see his bushy black armpit hair and the morbid tattoos up his arms. The blackness in his eyes has a slight twinkle she’s never seen before.

  He moves aside and wordlessly ushers her in. Closes the door. Locks it.

  Ashley knows where she is supposed to go, and leads the way to the back room with the piano.

  She turns around to see Silage holding up a pill between his grubby, stubby fingers.

  “You lose something yesterday?”

  Ashley says nothing, her eyes widening slightly as she fights to hide an involuntary gulp in her throat.

  “I hope you weren’t planning anything . . . unfriendly,” he whispers.

  She shakes her head nervously.

  “No funny business today,” he growls. “I just want the music.”

  She pulls an mp3 player and portable docking station out of her sweatshirt pocket.

  “And that’s what I’m here to give you,” she says. “Is it alright if I hook this up – for a little accompaniment? I recorded myself, and I want to do a duet, play off my own sounds.”

  He frowns.

  “It’ll be like I have four hands,” she assures him.

  His corkscrew grin creeps across his face. “Wait here, I’ve got something even better than that docking station.”

  He shuffles out of the room, and she hears him rummaging deep in the bedroom.

  She steps back into the kitchen and turns the gas on all four stove burners, only to one quarter turn each. A gentle hiss.

  She’s waiting for him at the piano when he returns carrying a huge pair of speakers, one under each arm, clutching a plastic bag in his teeth. He thumps the speakers down and takes the bag from his mouth. He pulls out several wires and adapters. He sets the speakers up each side of the piano, shoving stacks of cardboard boxes out of the way, loose papers floating to the floor unheeded. He leaves the room again and returns with a high-output receiver and proceeds to set up the mp3 player and speakers, running through the amplifier. He turns it on, turns it up.

  “There,” he says. “Now play.”

  She sits at the keyboard and takes a deep breath, clearing her mind. She hits PLAY on the mp3 player. And she places her fingers on the keys.

  Her live tune and the tune she’d prerecorded begin to dance and touch each other like a pair of lovers discovering one another’s bodies. Entwining and caressing and brushing against each other with heat and trembling.

  Silage sits back in an overstuffed recliner he’s moved into the room since yesterday – his own personal musical theater. He leans his head back and closes his eyes.

  Ashley pulls the notes from the deepest places in her heart, ominous and swirling, a whirlpool of sin and hatred and evil, sucking like gravity as it fills the gray room like a sullen fog.

  A black serenade.

  The sounds are crisp, cradling Silage in a cocoon of negative energy. Ashley nearly loses herself in the pit of despair the music is digging around the two of them.

  Ashley detaches a small part of her consciousness from the production of the tenebrous music to pay attention to the accompaniment. She listens to the sound blasting through the speakers – rumbling the floor and shaking the antiques around the house – so much more effective than her docking station would have been.

  As planned, the prerecorded music begins to crescendo and supersede her own playing, and she scales herself back imperceptibly, the soundtrack gradually ta
king over for her. She’d overlaid a second backing track which is now starting to take over for her, so there are still two parts, even though she is now barely playing the live piano. The effect is very gradual and very hard to detect in the wicked maelstrom of sound.

  She checks over her shoulder and Silage is in ecstasy. His eyes have rolled back in their sockets and his lids are fluttering softly. His face twitches every now and then as a particularly strong passage washes over his body and meets his ears.

  She is no longer playing live. She looks at him one more time, and he appears to be in a trance – wrapped in the blissful blanket of gloom and unaware of the world around him.

  She silently stands and carefully exits the room, one cat-like step at a time. She reaches the kitchen, where she can smell the gas strongly now. Looking back at Silage, he seems asleep, but she can detect a gentle sway of his head in time with the Darkness that is enveloping him. She turns all four burners up to full and heads to the front door.

  She stealthily unlocks it and creeps out of Silage Antiques and crosses the street. Pulls a cell phone out of her pocket and dials her own number.

  Atop the piano, the screen lights up on her cell phone, with three letters across the display:

  - MOM -

  The static discharge from the cell ignites the gas, and Silage Antiques explodes with a boom so deep it knocks Ashley on her butt.

  Burning debris flies in every direction, the flames soar into the sky as a pillar of fire – the heat from the blast is intense, enough to incinerate any evidence she may have left inside.

  There’s not much left of the building as a cloud burst begins to drop water on the raging scene before the fire department can respond.

  Just embers.

  And ashes.

  - end -

  * * * * *

  Pod N

  The brakes squeaked with an eerie whine as the white Chevy Silverado’s knobbly tires crunched to a stop in the dusty gravel and blackened twigs along the narrow fire road, high atop the San Bernardino Mountains near Banning Pass. A layer of black dust and ash covered the vehicle – from the orange-and-yellow light bar on the roof, down the doors with their worn CALFIRE decals, to the bent and tarnished running boards.

  Unit Chief Jacob Long had not believed the call when it came in from Hal Cooper. A diver stuck in the treetops sounded just plain nuts.

  Long stepped out of the truck and sniffed the smoky air, tipping back the brim of his red hard hat. Visibility was still pretty low, even though the air tankers and the ground crews had managed to contain, control, and finally knock down the six-hundred acre blaze early yesterday afternoon. An inversion had trapped the particulate matter from the valleys to the peaks, making breathing difficult, and seeing further than a few hundred yards impossible.

  Cooper, just three months from retirement, climbed out of the passenger side and pointed up, pulling his sunglasses off with his leathery left hand. “Right there. You see it?”

  Long followed Cooper’s outstretched arm to the highest branches of the charred pines at the top of the low ridge alongside a rocky ravine that ran by the fire road.

  And he saw it.

  “Yep. Sure does look like a body,” said Long. “But I think it’s just a wet suit or something.” He reached into the Chevy and pulled a pair of dark green Bushnell binoculars off the truck’s dashboard and peered up at the out-of-place sight.

  “He dead, then?” asked Cooper, squinting and scratching at his scalp through his gray hair.

  Long shook his head and said, “I still can’t make it out. Let’s see if we can’t get it down.”

  He replaced the binoculars and reached into the bed of the truck, slipping on a pair of work gloves and grabbing a filthy Stihl chainsaw.

  The two men hiked to the base of the tree, climbing over fallen timbers, some of which still had thin wisps of smoke escaping from their scorched ends. They kept glancing up to make sure they were approaching the right tree. When they reached it, Long took a breath, then yanked on the starter cord of the chainsaw, breaking the silence of the gutted forest. He placed the spinning chain near the base of the tree, and felled it within two minutes of the first cut.

  The tree fell toward the fire road, cracking through splintered, burnt limbs of nearby trees as gravity got the best of it. The smoky air was augmented by the smell of fresh sawdust. As Long shut off the saw, and the tree settled in its new resting place, the silence returned, louder than ever.

  The wet suit had bounced out of the limbs after the tree hit the ground, and landed about ten yards from the side of the fire road in some blackened weeds.

  As Long and Cooper reached it, they saw that it was more than what it appeared in the binoculars – it was a dead man wearing a wetsuit with full SCUBA gear.

  “Well, I’ll be,” muttered Cooper. “How’d you think he got up there?”

  Long, who spent many of his off-hours surfing the web, found his mind connecting to the memory of a stray email about an urban legend – one that resembled exactly what they had on their hands.

  “Well, there’s an old story about a diver picked up in the sea by an air tanker and dumped on a wildfire,” Long said, rubbing his chin as he squatted down to get a closer look at the corpse. “But that’s just it – it’s just a silly story. It seems extremely unlikely that it would actually happen. Our tankers, on this fire, didn’t even collect any water from the ocean – they used Big Bear Lake.”

  “Could he have been divin’ in the lake?”

  “I don’t think they do any recreational diving there, but I suppose he could’ve been on a rescue dive or something,” said Long. “But it just doesn’t add up. Our tankers wouldn’t have scooped near a rescue operation on the lake.”

  “Guess we better call the coroner,” said Cooper.

  “Yeah,” said Long, staring at the body. “I’ll radio it in.”

  #

  “Look,” shouted Autumn Bellamy, slapping her palm down on the steel desk of Sergeant John Lilokalani, “I haven’t seen Chance in nearly three days! I need to know what you are doing about it!”

  The bustle of the squad room momentarily hushed, highlighting her outburst. Tears welled up in her bloodshot eyes and she shoved a strand of blond hair behind her ear. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, rubbing her eyes and looking down.

  Her husband of nearly two weeks had not shown up three nights ago after a day of diving off Hanauma Bay, up the road from Waikiki, Hawaii.

  Lazy ceiling fans moved the humid air around without actually managing to cool anything down. Sergeant Lilokalani nervously shuffled some papers before glancing at the clock on the wall, then looking at the young woman and responding. “Mrs. Bellamy, I am sorry. We are doing all we can. Unfortunately, a number of swimmers, surfers and divers are lost off our coast each year. The ocean is beautiful but very dangerous. And I will be honest with you – after three days, the probability of your husband being found alive is – is quite low.”

  Autumn stared back at the native policeman for a moment, the look in her eyes rotating quickly through an incomplete grief cycle – denial, anger, bargaining, and depression – then skipping right past acceptance back to denial. She looked out at the blue sky and palm trees through the blinds in Lilokalani’s office.

  Then she spoke quietly and evenly, even as tears trickled down her flush cheeks. “Chance is not dead. I know it – I can feel it. We just have to find him.”

  #

  Chance Bellamy couldn’t breathe.

  He couldn’t feel his arms, or his legs.

  He couldn’t see or hear.

  But he was awake now – that much he knew.

  He felt no physical sensations at all – not even that of floating. Perhaps he was in a sensory deprivation chamber.

  That made more sense than disembodiment.

  He struggled for several seconds with the urge to inhale sharply, then remembered his diver training and calmed himself.
/>
  After a few moments, he realized that he didn’t need to breathe.

  Perhaps he was on a ventilator.

  An accident at Hanauma Bay?

  He thought back to the clear, warm waters. The tropical fish gliding around him in yellows and blues and golds and reds as the sunbeams cut through the waves overhead.

  Then what happened?

  A horrid image flashed through his mind.

  A machine. With moving appendages and clear, bright silvery eyes. It spoke to him without words, in what seemed to be English, yet was more meaning than diction.

  “Subject: Earth-1100010110. Human. Male.”

  It was not speaking to him, it was speaking about him. The voiceless voice moved through him like an ocean wave, muffled, distorted, yet full of power.

  “Transfer life to Pod N. Discard container.”

  And then it had all gone black.

  Chance now willed himself to perceive.

  Anything.

  Anything other than his own thoughts, and the scattered, terrifying memories.

  Memories that made no sense.

  He felt like he had been ripped from his body like an animal being skinned, the hide tossed away to reveal the flesh and blood within.

  Slowly, he started to see.

  Not with his eyes, but with some other organ – like a drug trip gone bad.

  He saw fuzzy light all around him, but no distinct objects.

  Then the light focused and resolved into the astonishing machine-creature from his tortured memory.

  “Subject is integrating,” said the creature, its solid silver eyes betraying no emotion.

  Soon, Chance could also hear. Or what passed for hearing. A low throbbing sound and some random blips and beeps.

  He struggled to speak, but had no lips. However, his message was somehow communicated.

  “Where am I? What is happening to me?”

  “Subject is self-aware, individual, inquisitive.” The machine moved to a control panel of some sort, its appendages touching several instruments in succession.

  “My name is Chance Bellamy. What have you done to me?”

  “Exchange successful. Pod N integrated,” said the creature.