Where Darkness Dwells

by Glen Krisch

  "You're never gonna see another sunset, shitheel!" said the unwounded man. "Don't worry, we'll make it go right-quick!"

  The man's shrill voice didn't create an echo. The air was alive with birdsong, buzzing insects, a lush blowing breeze. It was maddening after the cavern's compressed, blunted air. George ran, his adrenaline fighting the mounting fatigue from a sleepless and a seemingly endless night of fear.

  In no time, the clamor of pursuit intensified. Glancing back, he couldn't believe his eyes. Loping through clumsy strides, they were still somehow lightning-quick. But their skin… it had begun to sag, having turned to pulp. All three had started to disintegrate, even the man he hadn't shot. Lesions rioted across their exposed skin, gravity pulling the wounds wide. George turned away and crested a small hill, heading toward wetter terrain. The swamps. At least now he knew where he was. He darted down the trail, through wispy trees and rutted ground, unsure of his sanity after seeing such sights.

  Behind him, the men kicked through the underbrush, picking up their pace, gaining on him with every stride.

  2.

  Heat waves danced above the rail ties, blurring anything more than twenty feet down the center. Road dust stained his dungarees a permanent earthen color. His threadbare knees and frayed cuffs looked like diseased wounds trying to heal and not quite succeeding. Cooper's face was leathery brown with sunburn gathered under each eye. He walked the center rail with little fear of oncoming trains, having not seen or heard a locomotive in over a day.

  For the better part of a year he had been riding the rails, starting off from Chicago, tramping down to Dallas, and then out west, for an extended stay in California. He was now heading back toward Chicago, to home and family and his journey's end. Other people--typically traveling alone or in pairs--populated the rails along the way. Most tramps were men looking for work. Cooper had seen a few runaway children along the way as well. Judging the other tramps' haggard yet wary expressions, they were running from their past more than searching for their future.

  Cooper tramped for other reasons, reasons he still didn't fully understand. He had little need for money, and even at thirty-eight, didn't have a family to support. When he set out, his lone reason for traveling was simply because he could. Long after quenching his desire for travel, a greater motive compelled him to continue. His grandmother's dying words. He'd known her for such a short while, yet she'd used her dying words to placate him at a time when he felt his world becoming unhinged. With the end of his travels in sight, he wondered if he'd failed her.

  He adjusted his canvas pack higher on his gaunt shoulders. It would take an extended stay of eating steaming stews and gravy-dipped breads before he felt human again. In the next town he would check around, see if someone needed an extra hand. Chicago wasn't going anywhere. Besides, he didn't enjoy the prospect of arriving on his parents' doorstep looking emaciated and lacking the answers he had been so desperately seeking.

  Not long into his journey he learned he needed to find a job upon entering a new town. If he needed to rest a few nights in a real bed and eat food cooked in a kitchen instead of over a campfire, he would take on an odd job. People didn't understand or respect a man traveling alone without the need or desire for employment. Sweeping a storeroom or some other trifling job would get the stares off his back for the duration of his stay.

  Signs of settlement started filtering through a canopy of two hundred year-old oak trees. Some fields looked tended, some long fallow and overgrown. Many homesteads had boundary marker tree stands that doubled as windbreaks during the winter months. To Cooper, they looked like bony fifty-foot fingers bursting from the earth.

  He contemplated such a boundary between two farms. Without question one property was worked and occupied, while the other hadn't seen a plow's heavy blade in a generation or longer. Weedy trees taller than a grown man grew sporadically throughout the property. Thick wheat grass grew waist-high, heavy with ripe seed.

  The untended property was nearly clear from view when something caught his attention--the only unnatural color for as far as the eye could see. Everything was earthy brown or lush green, but a small red splash lurked within a copse of green growth. Cooper left the relative safety of the rails to investigate, cutting through the thinner undergrowth along a narrow animal trail. The land cleared, revealing a brightly painted water pump.

  The pump stood near an abandoned farmhouse hidden away by trees and thorny brambles. He eased his pack from his shoulders and stretched his aching back.

  With the home appearing abandoned, Cooper thought it wouldn't hurt anyone to see if the pump still worked. He grabbed the three foot arm and worked it for a good minute or two before it started to sputter and wheeze. Soon enough, water trickled from the wide spout, becoming a short-lived flow. He alternated pumping the arm and splashing his face with the cold water. He then filled his two canteens.

  Cooper removed his straight razor from his pack and began to shave off his facial hair. He'd receive a warmer reception in town if he could mirror more the townsfolk's appearance than a man who had been on the road for a year. As he shaved, he surveyed the homestead. It was a nice scrap of land. The farmhouse looked as old as the surrounding trees, and in its neglected state, seemed to sulk like a kicked dog. The former farm patch was hairy with sapling oak and dark green bushes drooping with succulent wild berries.

  Checking the sun's declination, he noted he had an hour or so before he needed to start worrying about getting camp ready. This property was as good a place as any to stay the night, he figured. Now that he'd shaved and washed, a good night's sleep would have him rested and presentable come morning.

  After serving up bland corn mush for supper, Cooper set up his bedding near the front porch. Sleeping under the overhang would keep him dry, but for some reason, the vacant windows and large brass-hoop knocker made him uneasy. Instead, he situated his blankets on a slight rise twenty feet away. He faced the house, his back to the untended fields.

  As the sun arched behind the trees, he wondered why the house was abandoned. Did the economic collapse bankrupt these people? He figured not. The land had grown wild for some time, long before the tenuous times they were currently facing. No, some other reason caused the farmers to shirk their land. Which was odd. People just didn't up and leave rich cropland. No, it had to be something else, some other reasonable explanation.

  As was often the case after a day without catching a freighter, Cooper was bushed. With heavy eyes, his thoughts mingled incoherently. His mind drifted from increasingly improbable theories about the people who once farmed this land, to thoughts of his family, before eventually settling on the certainty that he would soon be home. Before his eyes closed for the night, his last cogent thought concerned the library. He wondered if they had held his position as they had promised. He missed the library. Things would be different when he returned, no doubt. After all, he was a different man than when he started his trek. Still, he missed the musty aisles and retreating into the stacks and into the written word, where the world seemed so much more cut and dry than reality. His eyes fluttered, easing shut with the pull of sleep.

  Night darkened the house's interior, as if a long ago fire had left behind a charred, empty shell. In the quiet upper hallway, where no living person had ventured in eighty years, a gauzy spark snicked alive, shimmered and expanded under a glass globe, igniting a frayed wick. The lamp glowed golden, banishing the night beyond its ethereal reach. The lamp floated silently from room to room, pausing for a minute or more in each, plaintively pacing the house, as if the flame's bearer was searching for something long lost.

  3.

  It was a noise straight from one of Greta's stories. Metal striking stone. The tolling clang of a pickaxe methodically chipping away. At least that's what Betty Harris figured it sounded like. She had no practical knowledge, being sixteen, and not nearly old enough to remember the clattering of the former mines. No, she didn't know what could be making such a racket, but what else
could it be?

  "Junior?"

  Her little brother didn't stir. Normally, she hated sharing a room with an obnoxious, always filthy, six-year-old. She looked forward to winter nights when she could escape by sleeping on a mat by the cook stove. Warmed by the dying embers from supper, she would enjoy her quiet nights alone. Snug under blankets, wedged between the stove and the short distance to the back wall, it felt like having a room all to herself. But now she was grateful for his presence, even if he was sleeping like the dead.

  "Junior?" she whispered, sitting up in bed. "Wake up."

  "Hmm?"

  "You hear that?"

  More chipping sounds. Loud enough now to create an echo.

  Junior buried his face under his pillow, began snoring.

  For an instant, she wished George Banyon were here. The sudden thought surprised her. With his lanky goofiness, his good-hearted nature--if he could only be here to put his arm around her, tell her nothing bad was going to happen.

  Why did she think of him, of all people? Even though she wanted him to actually court her instead of acting like a fool, they'd rarely spoken in any depth. No, George Banyon wasn't here, and Junior was off sawing logs. Betty was on her own.

  She stood, slipping on her house shoes. She padded over to the bedroom door, pressing her ear against it to listen.

  She couldn't hear her parents stirring. But the sound. Digging. Grating metal on stone. Why weren't they awake?

  She stepped out into the hall. Then, beneath the chipping sounds, there was something else. A whimper, full of sadness. She followed her ear, tracking it down the hall, the whimper becoming wracking sobs.

  Mom.

  Betty entered the kitchen. Her mom sat at the table. Standing, her dad held her teary-eyed face against his paunchy stomach. His chest heaved as he tried to hold back spasms brought on by blacklung.

  "You shouldn't be here."

  He looked so old. They had been late parents, but even so, his wrinkles seemed too deep for his age. His lip quivered for a moment, then calmed. Along with the rest of his skin, his lips were cadaverous gray.

  "But I heard--"

  "Go to bed, and don't come back out again. Go on."

  "Daddy…? Mom, what's going on? What's that sound?"

  "Betty! Do what I say, girl!" he said, then seethed through a coughing fit.

  Her mother's eyes brimmed with pain and the weight of an unexplained misery. She didn't say a word.

  "Please, Betty-Mae." The intensity drained from him. He looked wasted away, the final snow melting in springtime.

  Reluctantly, she turned away.

  Digging, chipping, shoveling. The sounds were malicious, cold. She looked at the closed door across from her bedroom. The cellar. She could no longer deny it. There was no other place it could be coming from.

  But why?

  She shut the bedroom door, and of course, that lunkhead Junior was snoring even louder, oblivious to the night's bizarre events.

  The digging quieted, and after a short silence, was replaced by heavy-footed strides. Multiple people, from the sound. She tried to distinguish how many, but did it really matter? Who were these people?

  Maybe Greta's stories were true, after all.

  She opened her bedroom door a crack, just as wide as her pupil, waiting to see whatever had entered their house.

  Why did she think that? That word. Whatever. Didn't she mean whoever?

  She wished she would've made sure the cellar door was locked. But it was too late now. The doorknob turned, the tumblers rasping with rust. The door creaked opened. Her heart skipped a beat. She waited for her dad to cast out these invaders. No sound came.

  All she heard was her mother's continued sobs.

  A vile odor swept over her, reminiscent of days Junior spent in the swamps chasing tadpoles. The rank odor of pond muck and rotting vegetation. But this stench was ten times worse.

  Someone stepped into the hall. There he lingered, as if considering his surroundings.

  Is he looking at me? she cried out inside, frozen in place. All she could do was blink, her heart racing, aching.

  She couldn't see anything in the hall's inky blackness. The strangers filled the space, their bodies consuming the pale moonlight creeping through the kitchen windows. Immobilized by fear, she didn't want to move to draw their attention. She also didn't want to see what was out there, but found it impossible to look away.

  Then the floorboards sighed as they walked toward the kitchen, toward her parents.

  She could tell now, as they moved single file with measured, cautious strides, there were three men. Featureless; as dark as shadows gathering in a well at midnight.

  She expected a struggle or cries of outrage.

  Their shuffling steps and her mom's cries were the only sounds. One final heart-breaking sob from her mom punctured the night. Then the steady footfalls returned, heading toward her room again.

  One shadow-shrouded figure headed down the cellar steps. Followed by another. Seeing her dad's pale blue shirt was a shock after such darkness. His left shoulder came into view, then as he turned, she glimpsed his forearm with his sun-weathered skin looking like dried blood in the gloom. Then briefly, his profile. Two day's stubble, more gray than black. His crooked nose, twice broken in his youth.

  His eyes. She needed to see his eyes.

  Please Daddy. Let me see you!

  But he didn't look her way.

  He followed the men into the cellar. The last stranger stepped into view, blotting out the final image of her dad.

  She began to cry. Greta hadn't lied. Betty had never believed her stories, not until this very second. But what else could they be besides the Collectors? She blinked away her tears when she heard a noise coming from the cellar. Before she could figure out what it was, a new coughing fit covered the sound.

  She just knew he wouldn't go so willingly.

  But she was mistaken. She placed the sound as the fit subsided. It was rocks grating on one another. Being stacked in to piles. Replaced to their rightful position. Covering up the tunnel dug into their home. Sealing away her dad into the earth.

  4.

  The sun lit the horizon when Cooper woke from a fitful night's sleep, his clothes damp with dew. He gathered up his gear and headed back down the game trail. He took the slight hill to the rails at a solid clip, trying to warm his muscles. He felt compelled to watch the house until it disappeared from view. Something there was peculiar. He felt it when he was near the house, a pulling at his consciousness, an inexplicable yearning, and now, as he was leaving it behind, the feeling receded like floodwater.

  About a half mile off, Cooper came across what the townsfolk would have considered downtown. He left the rails since they curved away from town and into the hills, as if to avoid the town proper. There was a quaint main street, packed dirt like the other branching roads leading from town. Many of the shops had scavenged boards covering the windows. A bakery and a bar sandwiched a law office side by side by side, all three vacant and quiet.

  A few tired-looking cars were angle-parked curbside. Most people living in this stretch of country still relied on horses, as their fathers and father's fathers once had. Others would get by like Cooper, walking to and fro, from here to there, and getting to their intended destination a lot slower than desired.

  He stepped up to a plank walkway and considered the first business that wasn't boarded up. A hand-painted sign hung askew from the porch's overhang, touting the place as Calder's Mart. The window front displayed a handsome handmade rocking chair draped with a quilted tan blanket. A sign advertised flour, eggs and ice. Cooper peered through the window and could see a rows of dusty shelves. Campbells's Soup and sweet potatoes sat alongside glass jars packed with a variety of homegrown preserves. Tilted bins held fresh produce. Lettuce, tomatoes, chickpeas and beets. The stock was thin and the whole place looked sleepy.

  Across an intersecting alley, Cooper looked in on a barbershop. An old man reclined in a b
arber chair, his straw hat pulled over his eyes. He gripped a half-empty bottle of hooch in his sprawled grasp, and though asleep, it didn't look like he would let it fall to the floor anytime soon. Another man was sitting on a wooden bench near the window, flipping through a yellowed newspaper.

  "Good afternoon," Cooper said as he walked inside.

  "Um, oh, hello." The man folded the newspaper he'd probably read front to back more times than he had fingers. He had short limbs on a stocky frame. His toes barely brushed the floor from his sitting position.

  "Are you open?" Cooper's throat felt scratchy, his voice thicker than normal. He hadn't spoken to anyone in almost a week, since well south of Champaign.

  "We sure are, come on in." The man slapped his palm against the open barber chair, raising a dust cloud. The man occupying the other seat didn't move. "You don't look familiar."

  "I was just passing through, but with such an inviting town, I had to stop." Cooper sat in the offered chair. "Anyways, I need my ears lowered." It felt good to get off his feet and let his weight ease into an actual chair. His bones were feeling fragile lately.

  "You sure do. Good thing you stopped in. At least your shave is civilized."

  "What's this town called?"

  "Coal Hollow. We been 'corperated since before the Civil War. I'm Bo Tingsley," he said and started snipping around Cooper's neck with his sheers. "Dad was in the war, pushed them Rebs right back to hell, he and a bunch of boys from Illinois. Dad moved down the road from Peoria after his service to the Union, then married Ma not long after," Bo Tingsley spoke as if he had chewed the ears off everyone in town and was happy to see an unmarred pair sitting in his barber chair.

  "That so?"

  "Sure is." Bo wetted a comb and swiped it dry through Cooper's shoulder-length black hair. "You planning on staying for a stretch?"

  "I'm thinking about it. Coal Hollow looks like a good place to take root. By the way, my name's Cooper. Theodore Jameson Cooper. Most people just call me Cooper."