Personal Effects: Dark Art

24

Daniel Drake’s house rose out of the blackness like a theater proscenium, blasted bright by the Saturn’s headlights. The thing reminded me of a rotten tooth, mottled with decay, covered in filth and splinters. The one-story building felt taller than it had yesterday morning. Impossible, I knew; a trick of the light. But it loomed and leered at me, its darkened windows now eye sockets.

Watching, like tot-lot ghouls.

I killed the engine and the headlights. I slung my satchel onto my shoulder and stepped out into the chilly midnight air. I clicked on the Maglite. My eyes adjusted to the stark contrast of bright and darkness. Above me, the moon was fat, nearly full.

I was grateful for the flashlight: it wasn’t enough. I felt my nyctophobia pumping fear into my brains, my veins—but for this moment, the emotion was far away, glimmering like a lighthouse beacon. There were other emotions throbbing in my mind—anger, determination, concern. What overpowered them all was the flat sensation of sleepwalking… of arrival without travel… of inevitability.

Daniel’s blue pickup was gone. I peered at the building, listening. Music rose and fell from the living room, muffled by the walls. I walked through the muddy front yard to the porch. The house remained lightless, lifeless.

The music was clearer now. “Night On Bald Mountain.”

My knuckles rapped against the cracked front door. No answer. I knocked louder, calling Daniel’s name. I pounded. I yelled. My voice echoed in the night. I thought of Bethany Walch, the woman who’d befriended Richard Drake and his son ten years ago. The one who’d been threshed right along with the hay.

We heard her screams three miles away.

No answer.

I stepped from the porch, skulking to the side of the house, comforted by the heft of the Maglite in my hand.

Its bulb did not flicker, didn’t strobe as I’d seen a dozen times in the past few days. The Dark Man didn’t want to warn me this time. The bulb inside blasted ultra-bright for a moment—far too short a time for me to realize what was happening until after it’d happened—and then it shattered, the tiny shrapnel shards tinkling against the lens glass.

I stopped, glancing first at the dead weight in my hand and then to the sky, looking for the spotlight above. My fear of the dark surged like a wave, cold oil on my clammy skin, as a cloud swept over the moon.

Black. The whole world had gone black.

I doubled over, dropping the flashlight, clutching my arms, my stomach, gasps hissing from between my teeth. The fear… was a swarm.

My mind flickered, on-off-on-off, just like the Brinkvale hallways, Room 507, the hellshow, a horror strobe light. Bile, sweet and sickening, gushed against my tongue, filling my mouth.

Nonsense filled my head. I seethed, breath screeching as I hyperventilated, thick spit oozing from my lips, and this is how it ends Zach, alone in the dark, gobbled by black flies, shoo fly shoo, shoes, pinned me down to my six-month-old-Vans, pinned like a lepidopterist pins a-mazing Grace how sweetthesoundthatsavedawretchlikeme

My knees buckled. I fell. The phobia was my blood, my air, the pillow pressed to my face. And my God, the faces came now, all painted black, eyes and teeth frightfully white: Emilio (Vuhvammpire, he said) and Drake (Be sure to breathe, Mr. Taylor) and Henry (mercenary, a thing summoned from the) and oh God, there was Mom, pupil-less, blood bubbling from her mouth, singing me a nightmare lullaby. Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

My cheek pressed into the cold mud. Black vacuum. Airless. Soundless.

A century passed. An eon. And then, finally, the cloud’s tendrils swept past the moon. The world around me brightened slightly. Air rushed into my lungs.

I stood, body quaking, eyes blinking. I remained still, waited for the lights in my brain to come back on. I didn’t move until I was certain I wouldn’t piss myself.

The sound came from ahead, from behind the wood-frame house.

Tktktk. Tktktk.

“Back,” I said, slinging a palmful of spit from my mouth. My voice sounded alien, unused. I was drowning in the fear now. I coughed a manic laugh, recalling an AC/DC song.

“Back In Black,” I said.

Tktktk.

I stepped forward, nodding at the noise, heading to the rear of Drake’s home. I passed a waist-high pile of chopped wood. Yellow eyes glittered from the gaps between the blocks. Raccoons. Or darkling friends, perhaps.

The grass field behind the house rustled, whispered. I came to the back door and tried its knob. Locked. I brought my nose to the cracked window, gazed into the kitchen. The world inside was soaked in black velvet.

“DANIEL!” I shouted.

The wind swept in, carrying away my voice. The field whispered. And now my mind whispered… whispered slippery, boozy confidence. Oh, I knew this voice. It purred, the voice of a slut, the voice of sin, the voice of the doppelganger—the side we deny ourselves because it always brings misery and madness.

Hi there, Zach, it said. Long time.

“Anti-Zach,” I replied.

I’d lost my mind. I was certain of it now.

We’re back on the wild ride, ain’t we? Finally? Repeat performance.

“One night only,” I agreed, staring at the doorknob’s cheap lock.

Oh, gooood. Giddy-giddy.

Yes. Giddy-giddy. I opened my satchel and let my fingers slide inside, groping for the folder containing Drake’s Brinkvale admittance papers. I plucked a paperclip from the stack and pulled it from the bag. It glimmered in the moonlight.

I tugged at the wire, fingernails bending and denting it, using my teeth when I needed to, just like the old days, the A-Z days.

See, Z? You oughta keep me around. You need me. I ain’t as bad as you think.

“No,” I said, jigging the pick into the knob. “You’re worse.”

Ouch, partner. And can you live with that? Can you live with me being in your head?

The lock clicked. The door swung open.

“Let’s first see if I can live through tonight,” I said.

I stepped inside, on a mission to find the “X” on Drake’s mural map—the thing he’d brought me here to find. The darkness enveloped me, and I could feel the beast here, could nearly hear the saliva dripping from its black fangs.

Anti-Zach had enough sense not to follow.

The kitchen reeked of bacon grease, rotten food, cigarettes ashes and beer. My hand found a light switch by the door and toggled it up, then down, then up again. No dice. Daniel Drake’s electric bill was still unpaid.

The room felt like a walk-in freezer. I shivered now, marveling at the vapor puffing from my lips. The walls were alive, crawling with shadows, creaking, tktktking. I wondered which ones were the Dark Man, and which were my fright-trip imagination.

“Night On Bald Mountain” played on and on from the living room ahead, presumably from a CD.

The fear-needles poked at my skin, a thousand cold fingernails nicking and scratching. I told myself to breathe, to stay calm, that there was light in here, there really was, look, see, light.

My eyes adjusted to a keyhole’s worth of moonlight streaming through the window. It wasn’t nearly enough. I pressed my body along the wall, determined to traverse the room along its perimeter, inching against its walls and counters and

BONG.

I flinched, swearing. My hand flailed in the darkness, searching for the thing against which my hip had struck. Metal, smooth, pebbled with grime, grease-slick. My fingers found the wrought-iron cooking grates, and I nodded. Stove.

The walls tittered.

I stepped around the appliance, hand now sliding across its surface, now feeling the steel give way to pocked countertop. My fingertips parted a sea of crumbs, then pressed into something half-eaten, mushy. For a heartbeat, I was more revolted by this room than I was afraid of it.

The meager moonlight began to wane, victim of another cloud. I held my breath, desperate and sick again. No. Not now. Please, Lord. Not now.

My hand brushed against a small cardboard box, and I picked it up, praying for a box of matches. I shook it. The ex-smoker in me heard the ubiquitous rattle of cigarettes inside. I pitched it.

The kitchen was darker now. From the living room, the music began to stutter, fade in and out.

My hand groped again, and my panic rose again, blazing red-hot, blowing hypothermic in this icy room. Come, damn it. Come on.

“Come on,” I whispered.

The music roared louder, surging with static.

My sweating palm grasped the hilt of something plastic and I fumbled with it in the dark, hungry to understand it, see it by touch alone. Plastic handle, metal nozzle. A grill lighter—the thing with which Daniel Drake lit his gas stove, his cigarettes.

I sighed, index finger sliding past the trigger guard. I pressed its switch. The room flared to life.

Daniel Drake stood before me, his eyes bloodshot and murderous.

A whiskey bottle hung from one hand. In his other, a hatchet.

“You again,” he muttered, swaying.

I was stupefied, scared stiff.

“Never here. He was never here. And when he finally came home, Mom and Jenny died.”

His breath was putrid from the booze. My mouth tried to find words, but my brain was stuck, vapor locked. I suddenly needed to pee.

The living room thunderstorm raged on, even louder now.

“Obsessed, he was insane, obsessed,” Daniel said. He shrugged his broad shoulders. “He ruined everything. He ruined our brand-new life out here. My life. Her life. And. And then…”

He dropped the whiskey bottle. It shattered on the floor.

“…he…”

Daniel snarled, hefting the hatchet in both hands now.

“…left.”

The radio trumpeted a final crescendo, then fell silent.

“It’s you,” I said, backing away, the lighter’s flame still flickering between us. “You tracked them, all of them, all of his friends. You killed them.

“You’re the Dark Man.”