Available Darkness: Season Two (Episodes 7-12)

by David Wright

  Hannah sat on the toilet, floored. She couldn’t remember a single one of Sergei’s stories. Yet, each wore a thin skin of familiarity. Like a story once told, but not by her.

  After she was silent too long, Sergei said, “Are you there, Hope?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry. Just trying to remember.”

  “Any of that ring a bell?” Sergei asked.

  “Maybe a little, I don’t know.”

  “Where are you now? Are you OK? Are you still with John? Are you still painting?”

  “No,” Hannah said. “None of it.”

  Greg’s voice was at the door, a jackhammer to her nerves, sending her heart racing. “Hannah? You OK?”

  “I’m fine, just a bit sick to my stomach, I’ll be out in a minute,” she said trying to squelch the rising panic in her voice. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

  “Um, OK,” Greg said.

  Back to Sergei, Hannah said in a hushed whisper, “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go in a minute. But I need you to do me a favor.”

  “Sure, anything,” he said.

  “Do you know John’s last name? Have you seen him?”

  “No, I don’t think we ever knew his last name. But he did work at another restaurant, and … oh, never mind, that place closed down a few years ago. I’m sorry, I don’t know. Are you OK?”

  “No,” Hannah said. “I mean, I don’t know. Listen, I’ve got to go. Can I call you back if I need to?”

  “Yes, anytime, Hope. And if you need anything, anything at all, don’t be afraid to call, at any hour.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Sergei seemed as if he didn’t want to let her go; worried enough to keep her on the line. “Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you in danger?”

  Hannah forced herself into a tiny laugh. “Of course not, and I’ll be OK,” she lied. Hannah realized she should leave Sergei with something, after being gone for so long with nothing at all. “I’ll call you tomorrow; and thank you.”

  Hannah killed the call and stared at the phone, wrestling her confusion, and the thought of some alternate version of herself she couldn’t remember. She tried to pull memories from her past, but everything was like sand through her fingers, landing in water and scattering away too quickly. She tried again to remember her college friends, but every memory seemed stuck behind a wall of Jell-O.

  “That’s because they’re not real, Hope. None of it is.”

  Stop calling me Hope.

  She kept staring at the phone, wondering who else she could call. Her coworker and only friend Jenny?

  And say what? I think I’m someone else and Greg is trying to do something, but I don’t know what? Yeah, they’ll put me in the loony bin, for sure. She could hear the doctor now, “Sorry, that bump on your head in the accident was a bit worse than we thought. Turns out you’re nuts.”

  But nuts didn’t explain Sergei knowing her voice, or the dreams and flashes of John, and it ignored all of Greg’s mysterious phone calls. Something was happening, and Hannah couldn’t afford to be timid.

  She had to do something.

  But what?

  She thought of Greg sitting out in the car, waiting.

  There’s no way I’m getting in that car.

  “Then don’t. Go. Run.”

  She rose from the toilet, washed her hands, and approached the restroom door hoping Greg wasn’t being sweet, and waiting patiently for his “sick” girlfriend. Hannah opened the door, saw Greg standing there waiting, and tried to pick her racing heart up from the floor.

  “Are you OK?” he asked, looking in her eyes. “Wow, you seem pale.”

  “Stomach,” she said, holding her belly and wincing. “Just puked.”

  “Oh, wow, I’m sorry. OK, let’s get you back to the cabin and in bed.”

  She swallowed, looking past Greg to the red glowing exit sign hanging over the restaurant’s rear door. Every instinct ordered Hannah to run — right past him and into the night without stopping. Surely, he wouldn’t pursue her in public. Then again, it was dark. Maybe no one would notice if he did.

  Instead of running, Hannah followed him to the front of the restaurant, and then the parking lot. There were a few dozen cars in the lot, but no new arrivals, and no one leaving. If she tried to run now, or make a scene, there was nobody around to notice, call the police, or intervene. It would be her versus Greg, and she wasn’t sure she could outrun or overpower him.

  Greg opened the car door for Hannah, and she got inside.

  He got in and keyed the ignition.

  “Get back in there! Go in, leave out the back door, and run!”

  “Oh, crap, I think I left my phone in the restaurant,” she said, seizing on a half-baked escape plan. She could go in and run out the back, getting at least a few minutes of a head start. “Maybe in the bathroom. I’m gonna run back inside and …

  “No, no,” Greg said, laying his hand gently on hers. “You’re sick. Wait here. I’ll go back.”

  Shit.

  Greg surprised her by leaving his keys in the ignition. He got out of the car, then leaned back inside and said, “I’ll be right back.”

  “OK, thanks,” she said, her heart pounding while eyeing the keys.

  “Well, hello, Plan B. Take the car, Hope. Take it and go!”

  As Greg entered the restaurant, Hannah crawled over the center console and into the driver’s seat. She moved the seat higher and closer, then slowly backed out of the parking spot, darting back and forth between her rearview and the restaurant’s front door.

  “Go! Go!”

  Hannah floored the pedal, and tore into the night.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 8 — Duncan

  Duncan sat in the bedroom turned prison, focusing, searching, and probing through his parasite’s psychic defenses. The creature was sentient, and responded to the prodding with short painful bursts to its host’s brain; a message to stop, though it didn’t communicate with anything like words.

  Duncan wondered if it spoke their language, or even spoke at all. He shuddered to think of any creature existing without wants, needs, or desires besides feeding. Jacob was right about one thing: the parasitic bonding was an evolution inside him.

  Duncan could feel the changes in his brain even if he couldn’t figure out exactly how they happened. He was stronger, more aware, and his already enhanced senses felt sharper than ever. From dissections of feeders over the years, they’d found that the parasite connected to its host’s brain, forming an inseparable bond. But when the human, or Otherworlder, died, so did the creature. So far as he knew, the reverse was also true: if someone tried to remove his parasite, they would die.

  The only people he knew who’d been able to pause the parasite’s incursion were John and Caleb, though both used outside intervention of magickal means. And Duncan had not known how either intervention occurred or how to replicate the success, if it could be done. For everyone else, the parasite, and the Darkness it brought with it, were lifelong curses.

  Duncan had found its weakness, though. Everything had a weakness if you probed hard enough. It had a strong aversion to pain, and that pain was shared between the parasites’ psychic bonds, meaning if he hurt himself and Jacob was connected, he hurt Jacob.

  Duncan only needed to interfere briefly, long enough to allow him to connect with John and warn him of the danger to Hope. He’d first sensed John after Jacob showed up demanding the list. Duncan wasn’t sure why he could suddenly feel John in the world, or if the feeling was reciprocal rather than a vestige of Jacob’s ability to sense his brother, passed through his parasite.

  Duncan was reasonably certain the parasite would sense what he was doing once he reached out to John, though. Then the only question was whether the parasite in him would relay the information to the parasite in Jacob. Duncan hoped not, but had a plan just in case.

  He began searching the outside world for John, unsure of what he was doing, and almost certai
n he was doing it wrong until he felt himself suddenly inside John’s head.

  John, he thought.

  Then, just as if he were on a phone, he heard John’s voice in his head, surprised, “Duncan?”

  “Yes, I have to tell you—”

  Suddenly, he felt Jacob probing.

  Damn it, that was quick.

  Duncan tried pushing Jacob out of his mind, but the monster’s power was too strong. “Let me in,” Jacob screamed inside Duncan’s skull, the sound a neutron bomb between his ears.

  Duncan couldn’t let Jacob see what he was doing, or worse, try to stop him. He didn’t dare push another thought out to John until he’d banished Jacob from his head.

  Duncan buried his plan as his hand gripped tight around his desk chair. Immediately, Jacob sent a sharp pain through Duncan’s skull trying to stop him from doing anything other than obeying his master’s will. But there was no stopping the chair once it was in motion, crashing through the blackened windows.

  Sunlight poured into his prison, and with it, a rain of fire, erupting along Duncan’s arms as he screamed loud enough to spray blood from his throat.

  Jacob echoed his terror and withdrew from his brain like a scurrying roach. The moment he was gone, Duncan pushed the message to John, telling him as much as he could in the moments he had, though he was unsure how much of it was making sense as pain tainted his every thought, making it an effort.

  Do you understand?, Duncan asked.

  “Yes,” John said. “Where—”

  Duncan’s connection to John dropped as the door to his prison burst open and two men tore inside, trying to rip him from the window. Duncan shoved the men aside, then leapt through the glass and into the last hours of daylight.

  Behind the roaring inferno, Duncan’s life flashed before his eyes.

  Most of the memories went too fast.

  When they finally slowed, Duncan found himself standing on a dock overlooking the lake with Caleb as a young boy. He looked up at Duncan and said, “I can remember the flavor of ice cream you bought me at Six Flags, but sometimes I don’t even remember what day it is.” The boy shrugged. “I guess what you remember depends on what you think is important.”

  Duncan remembered looking into the child’s eyes and feeling a little less alone in the world. He might never have children, but he was lucky that he at least had the chance to feel a parent’s love, even if he wasn’t the boy’s father. That love came with fear, and a fierce desire to protect, like lion to cub.

  Duncan once believed he would never die, and never thought it possible he could die protecting a son.

  As fire ripped through his body, bubbling flesh and soul to vapor, Duncan found himself remembering Ed’s funeral again.

  Caleb had said, “This is all my fault.”

  “What do you mean?” Duncan had asked.

  “I killed him.”

  “We had an argument, a big one. It was about you. He wanted me to refuse the car you said you would buy me. He said it was too much. And that if I wanted a car, I should ask him. I told him I didn’t want a crap car, though, and that Uncle Duncan said I could pick any car I wanted. The look on his face, was just, it was like I had stuck a knife in his heart. He said, ‘Duncan Alderman is not your father. I am. And you have to do as I say.’”

  Caleb had to stop before finishing his story. “And I just said the most awful thing I could to him. I told him that I wished he wasn’t.”

  Caleb bawled as he fell into Duncan’s chest, crying. “Those were our last words. He died that night.”

  “Jesus,” Duncan had said, tears streaming down his face.

  It was then, as he comforted Caleb, that Duncan realized he’d not lost the ability to mourn. There was still one person left in the world whose death he could not bear, and whom he would do anything to protect.

  “It’s OK,” Duncan had said, hugging the boy. “He knew that you loved him. And he loved you very much.”

  And so do I, was Duncan’s final thought.

  TO BE CONTINUED...

  EPISODE 11:

  CHAPTER 1 — Hannah

  Hannah’s heart pounded as she floored the gas, pushing Greg’s car as fast as it would go along the Northern California highway. She tore from El Montaña and drove north without stopping for hours, too scared to pause her flight for more than a few minutes at a gas station about 150 miles upstate

  The station looked like it last had new pumps installed in the 30s, probably around the same time as the sign that read Gas-4-Less! in giant, blocky almost Art Deco letters. Though it was a full 15 minutes past “quitting time,” the old man working the station was waiting for his wife Lucinda to come get him. The old man asked Hannah what she was doing driving out on the roads all by herself so late at night.

  “You heading out toward Ashford Canyon?”

  “What’s Ashford Canyon?” she asked, thinking she should have simply said yes.

  The old man mopped his brow, just beneath the single tuft of hair, and looked at Hannah with undiluted surprise, as if it was impossible to believe that anyone could be filling their tank at his station and not headed out toward Ashford Canyon.

  Since the old man couldn’t go anywhere without Lucinda, he decided to give Hannah a history lesson while waiting. He jabbed his finger at a thick swath of trees, without any general direction. “You probably know all about the gold rush, right?”

  Hannah shrugged and lightly nodded. She knew a little.

  “The gold rush is what changed this state. You see,” he said waving his hands in a wild circle, “gold is everywhere. In every rock, believe it or not, and even ocean water. The world is always changing, and California wasn’t nothing like it is now millions of years ago when it was sitting at the bottom of the sea.”

  The old man took Hannah’s mild surprise as an invitation to continue. Despite her urgency to flee, there was something comforting in the old man’s lilting voice that kept her sitting in her seat and smiling through the open window, willing to hear the rest of his story.

  He thrust his thumb behind his shoulder and said, “The Pacific shoreline lay to the east, where Utah and Arizona are now. Hot springs along the ocean floor built up huge deposits of sulfide minerals. That makes gold, and once all that gold was sitting on solid ground instead of being stuck under water, people all around the country, if not the entire world, started seeing California as the end of their rainbow. Ashford Canyon was one of the state’s more profitable mines, until she called it quits back in 1968.”

  The old man whistled, and only then did Hannah smell the whiskey on his breath, which tightened her nerves and made her want to key the ignition and take off.

  “Now it’s just a ghost town people like to visit,” the old man shrugged. “But the hotel is nice if you’re looking for a place to stay, or at least I’ve heard it said. Never stayed there myself.”

  “How do I get there?” Hannah asked, thinking an out-of-the-way ghost town hotel might be the perfect place to rest her head on a pillow and gather some thoughts.

  “You can’t miss it,” he said, again pointing nowhere in particular. “Just keep driving on the road, you’ll see the first sign in about five minutes, then fairly regular after that. You’ll hit the canyon in about 25 miles or so. Just follow the signs.”

  “Thank you,” Hannah said.

  “Sure thing,” the old man nodded and slapped the side of Greg’s car as if giving Hannah permission to leave. “Just be careful and don’t drive too fast. The roads twist something fierce up toward the canyon, and there’s no light until morning, outside what you make yourself.”

  Hannah said thank you and turned the engine, then gave him a little salute just as what she assumed was Lucinda pulled into the station. Hannah turned to the heavyset blonde around 60, smiling from behind the steering wheel of an ancient F150, and sent her a similar salute. The heavyset blonde returned her wave, looking uncertain.

  With a full tank of gas, Hannah tore into the night, only slowing
through the treacherous turns the old man had promised. She followed the signs leading toward Ashford and was now only an exit away. As the highway turned flat, Hannah floored the pedal, racing through the walls of trees and hallways of darkness around her, keeping her eyes fixed ahead as she fled either paranoia or nightmare.

  Though Hannah didn’t doubt her instincts enough to stop, or even slow, she doubted them enough to fill her trip with plenty of mental self-flagellation.

  What are you doing?

  You stole Greg’s car and left him stranded hundreds of miles from home.

  Why?

  She waited for her other inner voice, the one which prompted her haste to flee like a bat out of hell. She needed that voice to weigh in and assuage her guilt. Unfortunately for Hannah, that voice stayed oddly silent, thickening her doubt and decaying her resolve.

  I should turn around, drive back, and say it was all just a joke, ha-ha.

  Maybe I can say I forgot about him, blame it on the accident and my bump on the head. Yeah, that might work.

  Despite the thought that Greg would probably forgive her, Hannah’s body was in no hurry to turn the car around. She accelerated, racing toward Ashford, eager to put more, not less, distance between herself, Greg, and whatever his plans were for her.

  What was he going to do to me?

  She thought about listening to the rest of the recording, to see if she could glean any more information from it. She would have to wait to listen to it, though. It was too dark, and the roads too unfamiliar to be messing around with her phone now. While nothing made sense, her fear was as real as any other instinct. Hannah now knew Greg was a danger, and maybe even a threat to her life, the same way she once knew she loved him.