by Brian Keene
“Dead air,” I joked, but nobody laughed.
I flipped on the CD player and Vertigo Sun filled the car.
It was the only sun we had.
We drove into the darkness.
CHAPTER SIX
The darkness on the edge of town was different from the darkness around it.
That was the first thing we noticed. We’d seen hints of that before, when we were standing in town and looking toward the horizon. It became more noticeable as we approached, and once we were actually there, the difference became unsettlingly apparent.
We drove through town, crossed over Route 60 and reached the outskirts of Walden, stopping in front of the big sign on Route 711. The side of the sign that proudly proclaimed You Are Now Entering Walden, Population 11,873, faced into the darkness. The side facing us said, You Are Now Leaving Walden. Please Come Back Soon. The words seemed to hang in the air, as if the sign were calling out to those who had already entered the darkness.
Please come back soon…
But we hadn’t left. We were still there.
I checked the fuel gauge. We had half a tank. I pulled onto the side of the road and put the car in park. Then I considered our options. No way was I turning the headlights off. We needed them. But while I needed to conserve gas, I was hesitant to leave the lights on without the motor running. If the battery died, we were in for a long walk home, and under these conditions, wasting fuel was preferable to shuffling through the shadows. I decided to leave the engine running. As an afterthought, I turned the music off. I figured we didn’t need that distracting us while we investigated.
After I opened the door and got out of the Pontiac, Russ and Christy did the same. We shut the doors quietly and moved slowly. The air felt heavy. Oppressive, like before a summer storm. I’d parked the car so that the headlights were pointed into the darkness beyond the sign, but it didn’t do much good. It was like the beams were hitting a wall. Just beyond the road sign, the blackness swallowed them up.
It’s hard to describe something that’s not describable, but fuck it—I’ll give it a shot. Imagine that you’re sitting in a dark room at night with no lights or candles or anything else for a source of light. Imagine that there’s darkness all around you. Total and complete darkness. Okay? Now imagine that just beyond that darkness is a different kind of darkness, blacker than the rest of the darkness around you. It seems to have substance, even though you know it doesn’t. It’s like tar or India ink. It ripples when you look at it out of the corner of your eye, or maybe it seems to shimmer. You can see the change with your naked eye—the razor line where mere gloom changes into obsidian.
That’s what it was like, standing there in the middle of the road.
“Jesus…” Christy’s whisper seemed to dissipate, as if the darkness were swallowing sound like it did the headlights.
Russ clicked on his flashlight, shined it into the impenetrable blackness, and stepped forward. I grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
“Don’t go near it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s wrong. Don’t you feel it?”
Russ stared at me for a moment without responding, then shrugged me off and turned back to the curtain’s edge. He moved the flashlight around, directing the beam at different angles into the gloom. Finally, he spoke.
“This is some fucking weird shit, guys.”
Christy and I nodded in agreement. I was about to respond when Christy silenced us.
“Listen,” she said.
We did.
At first I didn’t hear anything. But after maybe thirty seconds, I noticed that there were sounds in the darkness. They started out quiet but grew louder as we listened—slithering noises, growls and grunts and muted, warbling shrieks. All sounded as if they were coming from a long distance away. Some of the noises sounded human. Others didn’t. But in addition to those sounds, each of us heard something else, too. The darkness spoke to us. It whispered to us with familiar voices long unheard. Later, when we compared notes, we learned that each of us had heard something different.
The darkness spoke to Christy with her father’s voice. He’d died of a sudden heart attack two years earlier. Secretly I’d always thought that his death had a lot to do with Christy’s dependence on drugs and alcohol. I mean, we both liked to party, but for her, the partying had become something more after her father passed away.
Russ heard his ex-wife’s voice in the darkness, which was funny, he said, since before that moment, he hadn’t heard from her in more than twelve years. He didn’t know anything about her, other than she’d moved to North Carolina and started a new life without him, but now it was like she was hiding in the shadows and calling his name.
For me, the darkness sounded like my grandfather. I never knew my dad, and my mom worked two jobs to provide for me, so my grandparents pretty much raised me. I didn’t mind. They were both good people, and I’d loved them very much. Me and Mom lived with them. I slept in Mom’s old room, and she slept on the couch. When I was little, my grandfather was my best friend. We built extensive, highly detailed model train dioramas on top of his workbench, outfitting them with little houses and trees and fake grass and tiny cars. When I was twelve, he took me on a trip to Norfolk to see the navy ships heading out to sea, and another time, he took me on a weekend visit to Colonial Williamsburg. In the summertime, he used to take me out on the back roads in his car. When we got to a place where there was no traffic, I’d sit on his lap and he’d let me drive the car. He’d work the gas and brake while I steered. I’d loved him, and still did. Thought of him all the time. He’d passed away when I was fifteen. Came in one day from mowing the lawn, drank half a glass of water, and collapsed in the kitchen. Heart attack, just like Christy’s father. I remember how unreal it had all seemed, sitting there by his side along with my grandmother while we waited for the paramedics to arrive. We’d tried CPR and mouth to mouth, but neither worked. His lips were already turning blue by the time the ambulance pulled into the driveway. They said his death was quick, and that nothing could have been done, as if that was supposed to comfort me somehow.
As I’d gotten older, I sometimes forgot how his voice had sounded, but when I heard it there in the darkness, there was no question in my mind—it was him.
Except that it wasn’t. I knew that somehow, on some primal, instinctive level I didn’t understand; I knew the whispers in the darkness weren’t those of my dead grandfather. The voice sounded exactly like him, so much that it made my chest ache. It even smelled like him—Old Spice and cherry-flavored pipe tobacco and the strong scent of mentholated arthritis cream. Those scents wafted out of the darkness, and they were strangely comforting. But then I realized that there was no breeze to blow them; the air was deathly still, almost stiflingly so. So how was I smelling them? Where was he?
And then, even as those thoughts crossed my mind, he appeared, standing on the far side of the town limits sign, right in the middle of the road. He didn’t look like he had when he died—he looked younger than that, the grandfather of my fondest memories. He shone with a pale inner light, like there was a halo bleeding out of him. The light rolled off him like heat waves on a desert road, but it wasn’t a warm radiance. That light was cool. Not that I felt it or anything. That’s just how it looked. Cold.
False.
“Hello, Robbie,” he said. “Come and give your grandpa a big hug.”
I tried to speak, but my mouth was dry. My tongue and lips felt like they were swelling. The smells grew stronger.
“Come on,” he insisted. “It’s been so long. I’ve missed you.”
He held out his arms to me the way he used to, and I remembered how safe I’d felt with them wrapped around me, squeezing. I didn’t feel that way now, and I imagined that if I went to him, the squeeze would be something less than tender or caring. I stayed where I was. In truth, I don’t know if I could have moved even if I’d wanted to. My feet felt like they were ankle deep in cement. I glanced o
ver at Russ and Christy. They both stared into the darkness, gaping in the same direction as I’d been, but judging from their reactions, neither was seeing what I saw. I wondered what they were seeing instead. Then I turned back to my grandfather and he smiled.
“Go away,” I whispered.
“Come on, Robbie,” he urged again. “At least come over here where I can see you better. You’re all grown up now. All that blond hair and those blue eyes. You look like your mother when she was your age.”
He beckoned. The darkness seemed to flow around him like ripples in a black, oily pool.
“Go away,” I repeated, closing my eyes. “Please go away. You’re not my grandfather. You’re not real. You can’t be. You died.”
“I’m real,” he said. “Touch me, Robbie. Feel me. I’m solid.”
I opened my eyes. His eyes seemed to blaze with that cold light. It flared and sparked around his frame, billowing from his head and shoulders and fingertips. He still hadn’t moved.
But Russ had. While my eyes were shut, he’d shuffled toward the darkness. He stretched his arms, reaching for something I couldn’t see. He had a shocked, confused smile on his face.
“But why didn’t you call?” Russ peered into the shadows. “If you had just let me know you were coming, I could have picked you up at the airport.”
I glanced in the direction he was staring. There was nothing there that I could see. I turned to Christy, but she seemed oblivious to us both. Weeping, she knelt in the middle of the road, wiped her eyes and nose with her hands, and repeated, “I’m sorry,” over and over again.
“Don’t be silly,” Russ said, smiling. “It’s no trouble at all.”
“Robbie,” my grandfather called. “Don’t worry about them right now. I need you to come closer. It’s hard to see you.”
Ignoring him, I ran after Russ. He was just a few feet away from that thin razor line where the darkness became the absence of light. His smile had grown broader, and he nodded in response to something I couldn’t hear.
“Sounds good to me,” he said. “I missed you, too. You don’t know how much. Let’s go back to my place. The past is the past.”
“Russ!”
He paused but didn’t turn to face me. I hurried to catch up with him and grabbed his wrist. He turned to me as if half asleep. The confused smile was still on his face.
I squeezed his wrist. “Where are you going, man?”
“Robbie?” He blinked. “Hey, I want to introduce you to somebody.”
“There’s no one there, Russ. It’s a trick.”
“Are you nuts? She’s standing right there. Look!”
I did, and she wasn’t. I told him so. Then I told him about my grandpa.
“Robbie,” my grandfather interrupted, as if on cue. “Hurry up now. Enough of this foolishness.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I shouted.
“Who are you hollering at?” Russ seemed puzzled.
“My grandpa. You didn’t hear him, right? And I bet that you can’t see him either, can you?”
Russ nodded, frowning. He glanced into the darkness and then back at me.
“And I can’t see or hear whatever it is you see out there,” I explained. “They’re not real, Russ. We’re hallucinating. It’s like a bad acid trip.”
“It’s not…not real?”
“No. It’s just the darkness. Something in the darkness is fucking with our heads, man.”
“She’s not there.”
It wasn’t a question, but I shook my head anyway. Russ rubbed his eyes and hung his head. His shoulders sagged as if he’d been bearing a heavy load. I heard him sniffle and figured he was getting ready to cry. I was about to give him some space and check on Christy—who was still kneeling in the middle of the road—when Russ stopped me.
“Look at this.”
He shone his flashlight beam at his feet. I glanced down and frowned. A series of weird symbols had been spray-painted on the road, on both sides of the yellow dividing line. I bent down and examined them. The characters and shapes formed a picture of some kind, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was roughly shaped like a square. A door, maybe? Open or closed; I couldn’t tell which. The red paint was still fresh—not wet, but bright and shiny. A white, crystal-line substance had been poured along their edges, outlining them. I wet my finger, touched the stuff and then tasted some. It was salt. I got the feeling this wasn’t just graffiti. The design seemed more deliberate than that. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. There was a snake winding around a cross, several stars, some crescents, and something that looked like it belonged to the local Freemason’s lodge. There were a bunch of other symbols that didn’t look like anything at all—at least nothing I’d ever seen. Something had been written across the top. I assumed it was Latin but had no way of knowing for sure. The symbols looked like runes of some kind—maybe something you’d find on an eighties heavy-metal album cover—a classic from Iron Maiden or Blue Oyster Cult or Slayer. Or a diagram from one of those paperback spell books from the metaphysical section of the bookstore. I’d always found those a little suspect. If there was a book that really let you summon demons and shit, would it be wise to mass produce it and sell it at Barnes & Noble for seven bucks?
Here’s what the picture in the road looked like. Now, keep in mind, I’m no artist. If it looks like a little kid drew it, that’s because I can’t fucking draw. Before this, the only thing I’ve ever drawn was stick figures in school and the occasional crude genitalia on various bathroom walls. This is neither. I’ve tried to draw it from memory, so some of the details might be a little off. But for the most part, I remember it looking like this:
“What is it?” Russ asked me.
“I don’t know. Some weird ass shit, whatever it is.”
As we studied the graffiti, my grandfather appeared again.
“Get rid of it,” he urged. His voice was louder. Almost frantic. “Take a sledgehammer or a jackhammer or something to it. Dig up the ground around it. If you love me, you’ll do it. Get rid of those silly doodles, and then we can be together again.”
“No. I told you to fuck off.”
“Who are you talking to?” Russ asked me.
“My dead grandfather.”
“What?”
“I told you. That’s who I saw in the darkness.”
“Is he still there?”
I nodded.
Russ sighed. “My ex is still there, too.”
“Ssshhhh,” the darkness hissed. “Robbie, you’ve got to get rid of it.”
Ignoring the voice, I stood and walked over to Christy. She was still crying, but she hadn’t moved from her spot in the road. She looked up when I approached. Black mascara ran down her cheeks. I offered her my hand and helped her to her feet. She brushed dirt and debris from her jeans. Then I pulled her close.
“You know it’s not real, right? Whatever—whoever you saw out there in the darkness? They’re not real. It’s just a trick.”
She sniffled against my chest. “I know. That’s why I’m crying. It was my dad, Robbie. He talked to me and everything, but I know it can’t be him.”
“I saw my grandfather.”
“Are we going crazy?”
“No,” I whispered, “but maybe the rest of the world is.”
The shadows laughed with my grandfather’s voice. The echoes boomed out over us. Then the sound faded. Those familiar smells—aftershave and pipe tobacco and arthritis cream—vanished with them. I suddenly felt nauseous. I grabbed my stomach with one hand and gritted my teeth.
There was a burst of light on the horizon, coming from the direction of town. As we watched, a pickup truck approached. Its headlights cut a swath through the murk. It must have belonged to one of the firemen, because it had emergency lights mounted on the roof of the cab. They flashed yellow and red as it approached. Somebody tooted the horn. The truck had a roll cage on the back and oversize tires. Its sides were coated with dried mud. Somebody had been off-roa
ding with it recently. We stepped out of the way. The truck slowed as it neared us and sidled alongside. The engine ran loud and choppy. There were two men inside the cab. The driver rolled down the window and peered out at us.
“You folks okay?”
“We’re fine.” I nodded. “All things considered.”
He pointed ahead of us. “You haven’t been out into that have you?”
“No,” Russ said. “We just came out to see what we could see. Turns out that’s not much.”
The driver grunted, grinning humorlessly. “Yeah, no shit.”
“Are you the guys the chief is sending to the next town?” I asked.
“That’s us.” He nodded. “Nobody else would volunteer.”
“You might want to be careful,” I told him. “There’s something weird going on out there.”
“Yeah, we can see that. It’s dark in the middle of the day.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I mean, even more than we’ve seen already. Not just the darkness. There’s something else out there. Something inside the darkness. More than one, maybe. Or it could be the darkness itself.”
“No offense, but you’re not making much sense.”
“If you listen close, you can hear things in the darkness.”
“You can see them, too.” Russ’s voice sounded sad and frightened. “You’ll wish you weren’t able to, but you will. Clear as day.”
The driver shifted uncomfortably. Over his shoulder, I saw the passenger doing the same, staring at us as if we were crazy. I couldn’t say that I blamed him. I’d experienced it for myself, but I thought that we sounded crazy, too.
“Things?” the driver asked. “What kind of things?”