The Darkening (A Coming of Age Horror Novel) (The Great Rift Book 1)

by Christopher Motz

  “What’s the rush? Just do what you’re told and you’ll be fine.” He circled around in front of Danny, putting himself between him and the door. “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Twelve.”

  “That’s a good age, don’t you agree? I’m gonna be twenty in a few weeks. Fucking twenty! Can you believe that? When I was your age I jerked off all the time. Couldn’t get enough.” He laughed while slowly reaching down and unzipping his fly.

  Danny froze. His mind raced but his body was in neutral. He thought of ways to talk the man out of whatever he was planning, thought of ways to hurt him. In the end, he did nothing. Danny was no match for the bigger man.

  “Well? You know how to do it… so just do it.” He pulled his flaccid penis through the front of his pants.

  A lone tear ran down Danny’s cheek. “Please don’t,” he whispered.

  “It’ll be over in a minute, kid. Just remember, if you try anything stupid, you’ll be dead before you can get out of that chair.”

  The man grabbed Danny’s hand and placed it on his hardening penis. After that, the world went away. Danny hid behind a wall he quickly constructed in his own mind, refusing to see, feel, or hear anything happening to him. If only he’d gone to the arcade instead; if only he’d stayed away from this place. It wasn’t like he needed to look at another soggy page of another discarded nudie magazine. If it hadn’t been rainy and dreary, would he have still sought out shelter there? If he wasn’t alone, would this man still have had the temerity to do what he was doing? As if he couldn’t feel worse, Danny began blaming himself for not having the common sense to know what sordid acts took place inside these walls.

  “Almost there,” the man moaned.

  When Danny thought he couldn’t sit still for a second longer without losing his mind, the act was over. The man breathed heavily and leaned against the door, still exposed, and still watching Danny intently.

  “Not bad,” he said. “You might still need a little practice.”

  “Fuck… you,” Danny cried.

  “Woah, buddy, relax. I ain’t no fag. I got girls lined up around the block waiting for what you just got for free. How about a little fucking gratitude?”

  Danny squeezed his eyes shut so tightly that he saw little white stars exploding behind his eyelids.

  The need to vomit made him weak in the knees.

  When he opened his eyes, the man was behind him, zipping his pants and wiping his hand on his shirt.

  “Now get the fuck out of here,” he said. “If you tell anyone, you’re dead, and when I’m done with you, I’ll come for your mom and dad. Got it?”

  Danny didn’t stay long enough to reply. He ran from the shed with hot tears coursing down his cheeks. Exhausted, he dropped to the soggy ground along the creek and vomited. He dipped his hands into the frigid water and scrubbed them so hard they turned red. He washed the slime from his hand and puked a second time.

  Danny ran at full speed through the forest, falling several times and tearing his jeans. Low-hanging limbs scratched at his cheeks and ears. He twisted his ankle on an exposed root and fell again, but continued running. At that moment he was far beyond pain, and running was the only thing he knew. RUN. It flashed in his brain like a giant neon sign. He turned to make sure the man hadn’t decided to come back for seconds. The forest floor was obscured by fog; the ‘Shack’ was mercifully hidden from view.

  Danny never mentioned the awful experience to his parents, and he certainly never told any of his friends. As far as he was concerned, it would stay that way. He never walked in those woods alone again. Danny was just grateful that all he’d lost was his innocence and not his life.

  ***

  Danny shook the memory from his mind. It was a cloudless, warm afternoon. There was no sense reliving the past. It was done.

  Instead, he roamed the familiar paths with his best friends, enjoying their company and listening to their good-natured ribbing. They discussed heading back to the factory but weren’t keen on the idea, not with old man Moyer patrolling the grounds. They weighed their options, a change of setting, other ways to occupy themselves, but they mostly wandered with no destination. Summer was still in its infancy, there was no hurry.

  Several hours later they found themselves at their favorite lookout, a shady rock outcropping along the rim of the coal bank that overlooked Elmview.

  Danny sat and looked at them each in turn. “I’m really glad we’re best friends.”

  “Okay, can you dial down the mushy shit?” Brent asked.

  “Yep, we’ve lost him,” Eric added.

  They laughed at the joke, but the message was clear. They’d grown to become part of one another. Danny’s childhood friends had all moved away, Brent’s brothers were both old enough to live on their own, and Eric’s family was ruined beyond repair.

  Fate brought them together, and you don’t just ignore something that powerful.

  Brent looked at his digital watch and whistled. “It’s after seven already. Where the hell did the time go?”

  “I have to check in for dinner or my ass is grass,” Danny said.

  Eric looked over the town and sighed loudly.

  Brent picked up on Eric’s despair. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live with a family that didn’t love him or take care of him. Eric had become the lost puppy who just wanted someone to scratch him behind the ears now and again. “You wanna have dinner at my place?”

  Eric beamed. “I’m going to have to check my schedule.”

  “Well make it snappy, the train leaves in five.”

  “What’s the plan for tomorrow?” Danny asked.

  “Plan? We don’t need a plan,” Brent replied. “School’s out for summer.”

  As the sun dipped lower in the west, they sang the words to the well-known Alice Cooper song to commemorate their freedom. The lives they’d led before meeting and the trials they faced as individuals weren’t nearly as important as their time spent together now.

  Now was what mattered most.

  Chapter 3

  That night Eric returned to an empty house.

  Joan was at the bar again - something he was used to and something he often preferred over watching her stumble around the house on a vodka bender. Jacky was locked in her bedroom, fucking her flavor of the day and cranking Led Zeppelin.

  Eric quietly closed his bedroom door, covered his head with a pillow, and tried to block out the sounds of Jacky’s drunken debauchery. Much later his mother wandered in and joined the party, singing along to the cassette deck and crying out for her bottle of liquor.

  Everything had gone to hell since his father died. Eric could only imagine the level of embarrassment his dad would’ve suffered if he was alive to witness what had happened to his family. His wife had become a full-blown alcoholic, his only daughter a pot smoking whore, and his only son left to fend for himself, learning an early lesson that life just isn’t fair and bad things happen to good people. The house Dennis had paid off by working sixteen-hour shifts was a stinking hovel.

  Reeking of lost hope.

  Eric cried into his pillow, hoping not to be heard for fear of retaliation from his intoxicated family. What kind of life was this? Without Danny and Brent, he knew he would have ended his struggle by now. Pills. Slashed wrists. Whatever got the job done the fastest. With him out of the picture, Jacky and Joan would have an extra room to get drunk and high and spread their legs for strange men at all hours of the night.

  It didn’t matter as long as he wasn’t here to see it. The pain it caused him wasn’t worth it.

  Eric tossed and turned for hours, weeping quietly and wondering if there was an easy way out. Before he got an answer, merciful sleep claimed him.

  ***

  Danny’s sleep was troubled.

  He was no stranger to sleepless nights. That day in the ‘Shack’ followed him around for months; he couldn’t shake it and he couldn’t let anyone know what had happened. It stayed with him and fester
ed, always bobbing to the surface just as he closed his eyes. The months that followed were plagued by nightmares. The fear of seeing the man on a street corner kept him indoors most of the time. He was a prisoner of his trauma.

  The real issues began a few days after the incident. His dreams grew teeth. He’d wake up panting, slick with sweat, staring wide-eyed into the darkness, waiting for someone or some thing to leap out of the shadows. He tried sleeping with a night light, but when that failed to help, he slept with the lights on. When his parents turned in for the night, he’d brew a strong pot of coffee and listen to his music collection, staying awake until dawn and sleeping most of the day. Nothing seemed to work. He may have become afraid of the dark, but his nightmares had no such fear. Sleep deprivation set in, and with it came hallucinations.

  Danny stood on the doorstep of a nervous breakdown.

  Exhaustion owned him.

  Then came the shadows. He saw them everywhere… watching him, whispering unintelligibly in the wee hours of the morning. Danny prepared for the worst, sure his fear would kill him if he couldn’t grab a hold of it and bury it.

  His parents didn’t understand. They noticed Danny’s change in personality: his irritability, his sudden bouts of anger or sadness. They buried their heads in the sand and waited for the storm to blow over - just normal growing pains of a boy quickly becoming a teenager. They had no idea what he was going through and didn’t ask for fear of confrontation. Danny wanted nothing more than to unburden himself, tell them what’d happened, hug his mother and cry on her shoulder, but he couldn’t. The man said he’d kill them, and he believed every word. This was something he had to deal with on his own.

  Finally, the nightmares skipped a visit.

  A week passed. Danny didn’t just sleep, he hibernated. Color flooded back into his life. The shadows disappeared. Late-night coffee runs were discontinued. He felt like himself for the first time in months.

  Tonight, everything changed.

  The nightmare swept him away.

  He was back at the factory with Brent and Eric, separated from them by the rusted chain-link fence, outside looking in. He reached out and grabbed the cool metal, intending to climb over and join his friends, but the higher he climbed, the higher the fence grew. He ascended more quickly, the top bar just two feet above his head, but the fence kept pace, sprouting out of the ground like a giant weed.

  Danny carefully dropped to the ground and inched back. Brent and Eric remained on the other side, unmoving, blank. The wind picked up, sending leaves skating across the cracked asphalt of the parking lot. Danny called out to them, jumping up and down and waving his arms frantically, but still they stood motionless, unable or unwilling to communicate. As soon as Danny gave up his efforts to get their attention, they both turned and faced the crumbling building.

  The sky above darkened, turning the ugly blackish-purple of a fresh bruise. The clouds circled overhead as the first raindrops pattered down around him. The world dimmed.

  Something was coming.

  The hair on his neck and arms stood on end as an unseen force reached out and drew energy from the coming storm. Danny felt its rage, felt the vastness of time and space laid out before it like a roadmap. He tried to run, but his legs were frozen. One of the large metal garage doors opened with a rusty scream. Muted blue light poured from the recesses of the factory, bathing Danny and his friends in its glow. Transfixed, they stared as a form slowly came forth. Its proportions were all wrong, disguising its appearance by wearing a man-suit. Its arms and legs were grotesquely long, its torso misshapen, its head like a twisted caricature. The muddy blue light pierced its body like sunlight through a curtain.

  The man-shape extended its arms in a welcoming gesture as a mother to her children. Danny knew entering that embrace would be worse than death.

  “I have so much to show you,” it said. Its voice was a raspy, garbled horror, ebbing and flowing on the wind, punctuated by intermittent rumbles of thunder. The seven simple words bubbled from its throat as if spoken through a mouthful of blood.

  Danny stepped back.

  Brent and Eric shared a vacant glance and shuffled forward, toward the light and the thing within. The faceless creature exuded an aura of satisfaction. Its arms opened wider, beckoning them closer. The light intensified and pulsed steadily as if reacting to the monster’s heartbeat.

  Danny squinted as his friends drew closer.

  “I am the last, the strongest,” it said. “Come child, join me.”

  Danny shook his head like a wet dog. “No! The light is wrong.”

  “The light is home.”

  Brent and Eric inched closer as the creature reached out and enveloped them with its spindly arms. Their faces contorted in silent agony, their bodies shrinking, becoming less real.

  Danny screamed as the beast opened its eyes, large silver globes broken by gray swirls of undulating mist. He continued to scream as the wraith mockingly screamed back. He closed his eyes so tightly his head began to ache. He sensed its approach. The air grew thick, and the rain fell in sheets. The awful blue light pierced his eyelids and dug around in his brain.

  When Danny stopped screaming, the world went silent. The rain fell, the wind raged, the thunder rumbled, shaking the ground beneath his feet, but it made no sound, like a muted television. From that silence came the creature’s voice.

  “Not yet Daniel Harper, but soon. Rest assured, we’ll see each other again.”

  When Danny opened his eyes to confront the entity, he faced nothing more than the four familiar walls of his bedroom. His Aerosmith poster was in its proper place. A framed postcard from a fifth-grade field trip hung nearby. The thing, the factory, his doomed friends, all gone. Just a dream - a very vivid dream, but nothing more.

  He sat up in bed and saw it was already getting light outside. The small red numbers on his digital alarm clock showed that it was just after five in the morning. Normally he’d roll over and attempt a few more hours, but at this point, sleep was no longer an option. Danny stepped out of bed, his sheets and clothing both damp with perspiration. A cool breeze blew through the open window, drying the sweat on his brow. Reality reasserted itself as the nightmare faded.

  ***

  It was after seven when he hopped out of the shower, toweled off, and returned to his bedroom. The early morning sun had faded, giving way to thick gray clouds that rolled in from the east. Lightning flickered spasmodically on the horizon, followed by distant thunder.

  Danny peeked out his window, expecting to see the same old nothing he’d grown accustomed to. Instead, there were two police cars parked along the curb and a silent ambulance sitting in the driveway of the house next door. Two-way radios squawked from the cruisers’ open windows. A black van pulled up as he watched, coming to rest behind the ambulance, the word ‘Coroner’ emblazoned across the side in large white letters.

  Danny didn’t need to see more to know what this meant. Gary Jones was dead.

  When Danny was younger, he’d often go over to old man Jones’s house to help with yardwork: cutting the grass, trimming the hedges, removing leaves from the gutters from the old maple tree out back. Danny’s mother told him it was his civic duty to help the elderly. Danny didn’t know exactly what that meant, but his time over at Mr. Jones’s house was always enjoyable for them both.

  Danny loved the old man’s stories about growing up in Elmview, in the days when the roads were still dirt and trolleys were considered the quickest way from town to town. His wife had died in 1959 and he never remarried or had any children to pass along his knowledge. Danny became that surrogate son, and it benefited them both in ways they could never express.

  Danny stepped away from the window, saddened by the loss of his old friend. He knew that soon they’d wheel Gary’s body from the house, covered in a sheet or body bag, hidden from view so as not to upset the nosy neighbors watching the show over their morning coffee and cinnamon buns.

  Danny understood death. Even at a youn
g age, death was always very real to him, real in the sense that it was final and absolutely guaranteed. No refunds, no do-overs, no taking it back. Death eventually comes for us all, and when it does, all anyone can hope for is a pair of clean underwear and a fitting eulogy. Danny’s mother often said that her son was an old soul, wise beyond his years. Perhaps she was right.

  He went downstairs and ate breakfast without tasting it. He made a bowl of cereal, grabbed a half-stale chocolate donut, and washed it down with a glass of Kool-Aid. He was cleaning up as his mother walked into the kitchen, still wearing the hideous pink angora bathrobe his father had gotten her the previous Christmas. She never took the ugly thing off.

  “Sleep well last night?”

  He lied. “Yeah, mom. Mr. Jones is dead.”

  “Yeah, he is,” she nodded. “He went in his sleep. We should all be so lucky.”

  Danny didn’t necessarily agree. He supposed that as long as you didn’t cross into the next world kicking and screaming, that was about as lucky as anyone gets. But what if that next world wasn’t there waiting for you when you arrived? What if death was just the end? Did it really matter how you died if the second you checked out was just the beginning of nothing? Danny shook his head and tried to clear the thoughts from his mind. He was already in a foul mood without waxing philosophical.

  His mother looked at him quickly, fidgeting with a rubber band she’d grabbed off the counter. “I know you two were pretty close. Are you going to be okay?”

  “I’ll be fine mom.”

  “That’s my boy,” she said. She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently.

  Rather than dwell on the morning’s events, Danny headed to Brent’s a little early.

  “Brent is out with his dad,” Margaret said. “I doubt they’ll be back before dinner.”

  For fuck’s sake.

  He stood on the porch and watched cars pass by. This wasn’t how he wanted to spend his morning. He walked around the corner with his head hung low. The day was going to hell fast, and he hoped Eric could somehow salvage it for him. He wasn’t looking forward to knocking on Eric’s door, but without Brent, he had no choice. As he mounted the stairs, he wondered who would answer the door. Jacky was a lost cause, but his mother had her better days. The problem was never knowing which version of Joan you’d get - the sober ghost or the drunken demon.