Dark Room

by Tom Becker

  “No thanks,” said Darla.

  Sasha grinned. “All the more for me.” She took a sip from the cup, and winced. “Ugh, this tastes like gasoline.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” a voice said acidly. “Who invited you?”

  Her heart sinking, Darla turned round to find Carmen Russo staring at her, her blond hair tumbling gracefully down over her bare shoulders. Gabrielle was at Carmen’s side, her eyes narrowed.

  “Good evening, ladies,” Frank said quickly. “Are we enjoying the party?”

  Gabrielle ignored him. “This is a Hills party, Sasha,” she said, with a pointed glance at Darla. “No Creekers allowed.”

  “Nobody told me,” Sasha replied with a shrug.

  “I didn’t see you at the funeral,” said Carmen. “Or your little friends. So what makes you think you can show up now?”

  “It’s not your house, Carmen – or your party,” said Sasha. “Go shriek at someone who cares.”

  Carmen spun on her heel and stalked away. Gabrielle went after her friend, shooting Sasha a withering look as she left.

  “That’s what I love about you, Sasha,” an amused male voice said behind her. “You’re such a people person.”

  Ryan had just climbed out of the pool, and was rubbing himself down with a towel. Darla tried not to stare at the water droplets running down his bare, muscular chest. Even she had to admit he was gorgeous. Everyone here was.

  “I get on with normal people just fine, Swim Team,” Sasha said adamantly. “But those girls are part-alien.”

  Ryan adopted an expression of mock-offence. “Those are Natalie’s best friends you’re talking about.”

  “Which explains a lot about Natalie,” Sasha shot back. “You really think she’s looking down now, enjoying your little soiree?”

  “Natalie was a party girl,” said Ryan. “It’s what she would have wanted.”

  Darla wasn’t sure this was true, but she knew better than to say anything. Ryan only had eyes for Sasha, anyway. Darla couldn’t work out how her friend felt about ‘Swim Team’. Sasha was constantly rude about him, behind his back and to his face, but at the same time she didn’t seem to mind talking to him. To Darla there was something callous about the way Ryan was chatting up Sasha – this was supposed to be a wake for his murdered girlfriend, after all. But no one else seemed to care. Everyone was too busy having fun, downing cups of punch and bombing the pool, or dancing on the terrace to the music.

  Everyone except Darla and Frank.

  They perched next to each other on a sun lounger by the pool, on the awkward fringes of the party. Frank barely spoke, his blue eyes intently watching Sasha as she sparred with Ryan. Darla was beginning to suspect that Frank felt more for his best friend than he was willing to let on – not that Sasha would ever reciprocate, she was sure. It was crazy, in a way: in any other town, Frank would have been one of the best-looking boys around. Here, Darla felt as though she was the only one who had noticed how attractive he actually was.

  Frank took a sip of punch, winced, and tipped his cup into the bushes.

  “I might see if I can find something I can actually, you know, drink,” he said. “You want anything?”

  Darla shook her head, and he went back to the terrace. As she stared into the rippling pool, she heard a soft giggle behind her. Inside Ryan’s gazebo, TJ Phillips had his arm around a girl and was whispering into her ear. The girl giggled again, kissing him and tracing a finger across his cheek. Coyly telling him she had to powder her nose, she got up and headed into the house, leaving TJ to sit back contentedly and sip on his beer. A hot flush of anger came over Darla. She got up from the lounger and went into the gazebo.

  “Remember me?” she said.

  TJ tapped his beer bottle thoughtfully. “You’re the girl who found Natalie’s body,” he said finally.

  “I’m the girl you photographed for your stupid website and then ignored in the hall. One of your Plain Girls.”

  “Oh.” TJ reclined back on the cushions, a smile flickering across his face. “Yeah, I remember now.”

  “That’s it?”

  TJ shrugged. “It was just a joke. No need to get dramatic. Most of the girls we photographed were happy to get the attention.”

  “They were happy?” Darla couldn’t believe her ears. “You can’t seriously believe that, can you?”

  “Whatever.”

  She was trembling with anger. “Well maybe someone might take a bad photograph of you someday,” she said, her voice rising. “Then we’ll see how you like it.”

  “Are you threatening me?” said TJ, with an incredulous laugh. “Don’t you know who I am?”

  “Sure I do,” Darla retorted. “A grade-A asshole.” She stormed out of the gazebo and went over to Sasha, who had finished both her cups of punch and was starting on Ryan’s beer. She giggled as Darla pulled her away, already a little drunk.

  “I’m getting out of here,” Darla told her in a low voice.

  “Now?” said Sasha. “But we only just arrived!”

  “I know. It’s OK, I can make my own way back.”

  “But you’re supposed to be sleeping over at my house!”

  Frank wandered back from the house with a can of soda. “If she wants to go it’s no big deal,” he said. “I can drive her home.”

  “And what am I supposed to do?”

  “Hang out with Carmen and Gabrielle,” suggested Ryan, who was looking on with open amusement. “They’re big fans of yours.”

  “Go and do some laps or whatever it is you do,” Sasha snapped. “This doesn’t concern you, Swim Team.”

  As her friends began to bicker with each other, a loud splash made Darla turn around. The boys had climbed out of the pool to follow the girls on to the dance floor, leaving trails of damp footprints across the terrace. Behind them the water slowly settled, until it was as still and clear as a pane of glass. As Darla stared at her reflection, the loud music and Frank and Sasha’s voices faded into the background. The world shuddered.

  Slowly colours and shapes swam into focus before her eyes. In her mind Darla was back in the windowless dark room, standing over a photograph developing in a tray of fluid. She wanted to look away but her eyes were no longer her own, and she could feel her breaths quicken with excitement as the image emerged. The picture was a black-and-white blur, a snapshot of a hanged body. The killer used a pair of tongs to fish the photograph from the tray, carefully pegging it on to a line to dry. Beside it was a second picture: another body, this one lying facedown in the still waters of Ryan’s swimming pool.

  Darla gasped and stumbled backwards into Sasha, knocking her bottle and spraying Ryan with beer.

  “Hey!” he cried. “Watch it!”

  “I saw something!” she gasped, clutching his arm. “A body, right there in the pool!”

  “Okaaaaay,” said Ryan. “And exactly how much punch have you had?”

  “I ain’t drunk!”

  “Darla, you’re seeing dead people. This isn’t The Sixth Sense.”

  She took a deep breath. “You need to stop this party,” she told Ryan with a level gaze. “Or something terrible is going to happen.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Ryan replied. “Frank’s going to dance.”

  “I’m not kidding!” She wanted to slap that crooked grin off his face, anything to stop him making stupid jokes and listen to her. Suddenly Darla was aware that the people around her had stopped dancing and were staring at her. Her cheeks reddened.

  “OK, then!” Sasha said brightly. She drained her beer bottle and tossed it into the bushes. “So we’re going to leave now. Thank you, Ryan, for a wonderful evening.”

  Sasha’s hand closed firmly around Darla’s wrist, dragging her off the terrace before she could argue. Gabrielle folded her arms as they walked past, an icy smile on her face. Sniggers of laughter followed them as Sasha marched Darla down the passageway around the side of the house and out on to the driveway. Frank hurried ahead of them and unlocked
the truck, and before she knew it Darla was sitting in the backseat.

  “Not cool,” Sasha muttered under her breath as she climbed up into the front seat. “So unbelievably not cool.”

  “You shouldn’t have made me leave,” Darla told her. “I needed to make Ryan listen to me.”

  Sasha turned upon her. “You needed to be quiet and stop embarrassing yourself,” she said. “If you wanted to go home, you coulda just gone – you didn’t have to make up some big drama.”

  “But I wasn’t—!”

  “Just stop it, OK?”

  “I didn’t make it up!” Darla blurted out. “I saw a body in the water, just like I saw pictures of Natalie’s house in the killer’s photograph album before she died. I didn’t say anything then and she got murdered, so what do you think’s going to happen now?”

  Sasha stared at her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Silence fell over the truck. Darla’s breaths came quickly and defiantly. She had said more than she meant to. Sasha and Frank had both turned round in the front seat and were watching her carefully.

  “You wanna run that by me again?” Sasha said.

  Darla looked over at the large shadow of Ryan’s house. She swallowed.

  “It’s kinda hard to explain,” she said finally. “I-I’ve been seeing things.”

  “Okayyyy,” said Frank. “What kind of things?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it,” Darla told him. “My mind takes me to this room, and it’s like I’m looking through someone else’s eyes.”

  “Whose eyes?” asked Frank.

  “I don’t know!” Darla said helplessly. “I never see their face. But this room’s a real bad place – there are photos everywhere of dead bodies and people getting murdered. One time I saw this guy looking at an album filled with pictures of Natalie’s house – that’s how I knew that something was wrong that night. I knew someone wanted to hurt her.”

  Frank shook his head. “This is pretty out there.”

  “Out there?” Sasha echoed incredulously. “That’s one way to put it. Jesus, Darla! Do you have any idea how crazy this sounds?”

  “Why do you think I haven’t told anyone?” Darla said bitterly.

  “I know sometimes people can say things to get attention, but this isn’t the way to do it.”

  “You can go to hell if you think I’d make this up,” said Darla. “I didn’t ask for any of this. You think I wanted anyone to kill Natalie? You think I wanted to see a dead body in the pool tonight? But I did, and I can’t ignore it this time. I have to go back and talk to Ryan again.”

  “He’ll be too busy laughing to listen,” Sasha told her firmly. “And then he’ll get bored and throw you out. We’re officially done here, Darla. Come back to my house and tomorrow we’ll go to school together, and I promise you Ryan and all his friends will be as alive and perfect and irritating as usual. Deal?”

  “I think I’d rather go home,” Darla said quietly.

  Sasha shrugged. “Have it your way.” She tapped Frank on the shoulder. “Home, James.”

  He turned on the engine and guided the truck down the driveway and out through Ryan’s gates, which closed behind them with an iron clang. As they drove home, Darla silently fumed. She knew that Sasha and Frank didn’t believe her. Did they really think she could have lied about her visions just to get attention? When the truck pulled up outside her house, Darla got out without a word and hurried inside. The lights were off and Hopper’s door was closed as Darla went upstairs and crawled into bed. She was utterly exhausted, but it was a long time before she fell asleep.

  The party was officially over. Ryan’s moonlit terrace was strewn with plastic cups and upturned loungers, an empty bottle of rum bobbing mournfully on the surface of the pool. Inside the house was even worse: the kitchen floor was sticky with alcohol and some douchebag had been hurling damp wads of toilet paper at the bathroom ceiling. It was a good job Ryan’s parents were on the other side of the world – Kenya? Tanzania? Uganda? Somewhere in Africa – else he would have been in a world of trouble. As it was, the worst he had to face was the maid when she came to clean the next day. Ryan would kiss her cheek and tell her she was the best maid in the world and everything would be all right. He knew how to get away with things – especially when it came to women.

  Sometimes even that was more hassle than it was worth. During the party one of the West Academy cheerleaders, Harmony, had got drunk and tried to come on to him, grinding up against Ryan on the dance floor and giggling as she rubbed her hand across his bare chest. There was no denying that she was hot, but it was just so … easy. Ordinarily Ryan would have taken her upstairs anyway, just for the hell of it, but tonight was different. For one thing, there was Natalie. Throughout the night Ryan had half-expected her to appear, angrily flicking her hair as she poked him in the chest and shouted at him for hitting on other women. Natalie always came to his parties; it seemed impossible that she wouldn’t. That she was … dead. Whenever Ryan thought about that word, it felt as though he was standing on the edge of a dark, dizzying pit that threatened to swallow him up whole. So he tried not to think about it, pushing Natalie to the very back of his mind.

  And then, more unexpectedly, there was Sasha. She wasn’t the kind of girl Ryan usually went for – she was far too smart-mouthed for one thing, and all that goth stuff was for bedwetters and little boys. But maybe that was the point. Sasha intrigued Ryan in a way other girls didn’t. He was pretty sure that she liked him, but any time they started to get close she would pull away. Take tonight: he had invited Sasha to the party, only for her to turn up with her loser friends and leave before the party had even got going. What was the problem? Was she too proud, or did she actually think she was better than him?

  Ryan had still been turning Sasha’s departure over in his mind when Harmony had leaned in and tried to kiss him. Irritably he had pushed her away – Harmony stared at him, astonished and upset, and then elbowed her way off the terrace. One of her friends gave Ryan an accusatory look.

  “What?” Ryan had snapped.

  A black mood had descended over him – barging into the house, he had ripped the stereo power cable from the socket and shouted at everyone to get out. There were a few boos, some muttered complaints, but when they saw the look on his face people had started to drift away. TJ had been the only one to stay behind but Ryan had no idea where he had gone – listening to his music, maybe, or throwing up in the bathroom. Leaving Ryan all alone.

  Ryan’s humourless laughter echoed around the terrace. He was having a little pity party, all by himself. What a loser! He righted a sun lounger and settled down upon it. He was supposed to be going to a swim meet this weekend – he wondered whether it would be going ahead after what had happened. Nothing seemed to be going right any more.

  Ryan felt his eyelids begin to droop shut. A second later, they were wide open as music erupted from inside the house. Lil Wayne’s voice boomed out across the night sky.

  “TJ!” Ryan groaned. “C’mon, dude, turn it down!”

  But with the stereo on full-blast, there was no way that TJ could hear him. The volume was so loud that the music had distorted, the bass a fuzzy mess. If the neighbours complained to his parents Ryan was never going to hear the end of it. He rolled off the lounger and slowly got to his feet. The beer had made his head woozy, and there was a sour taste in his mouth. Groggily Ryan picked his way along the terrace and walked through the French windows.

  “TJ? What the hell—?”

  The floor trembled under the deafening assault of the stereo. In the middle of the room, TJ was suspended in mid-air beneath the ceiling fan. Somehow his headphone cord had become caught up in the blades, stringing up him up by the neck and choking him. His legs kicked feebly at fresh air as he clutched at the cord around his neck with his left hand. His right was holding his belly, which Ryan saw now was covered in blood. TJ had been sliced open, and was fighting to keep his guts inside his body.

  Ryan
staggered over to his friend and grabbed his legs, trying to hold him up. He could feel the strength draining from TJ’s limbs, but there was no way he could get him down without further opening the yawning red wound in his belly. TJ spluttered, spraying blood over his shirt. Then he stopped kicking.

  “TJ?” Ryan said hoarsely. “TJ, man, c’mon!”

  He looked up, only to see his friend’s head slumped to one side. For a time Ryan didn’t move, clutching his friend’s body as choked sobs escaped from his throat. The song ended, and in the few seconds of silence before the next one began he slowly let go and took a step back. He was numbly aware that his friend’s blood was all over him – on his hands and face and in his hair. Ryan walked over to the stereo and turned down the volume, plunging the house into silence. A breeze stole in through the French windows, sending TJ’s body swaying from side to side. Ryan stared out into the night.

  Somewhere in the darkness, a light blinked.

  There was someone out there.

  Crouching down, Ryan picked up a broken bottle from the carpet. He knew, with ice-cold certainty, that he was going to kill whoever had done this. No arrest and no trial: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. He edged out on to the terrace, scanning the bushes for movement. The pool glimmered under the glow of the Chinese lanterns. Everything was eerily quiet.

  “Come on,” Ryan muttered, under his breath. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Click.

  The noise came from the gazebo – too late, Ryan whirled around. Someone charged into him, knocking him backwards into the pool. Ryan tumbled with a yell into the water, the broken bottle flying from his hand. He kicked off the bottom of the pool and swam powerfully to the other side, bursting back through the surface and quickly wiping the hair out of his eyes. The terrace was empty. The killer had vanished.

  “Is that it?” Ryan called out in a ragged voice. “You think I’m going to drown in my own pool? I’m captain of the swim team, asshole!”

  He slapped the water, sending up a great spray into the air. But no one answered him.