Rise the Dark

by Michael Koryta

  What mattered the most to him, though, was in the bedroom at the far end of the upstairs hall. There, words had been painted among the drawings. Each drawing was carefully, artistically done, clean and precise. The words were not. They were lettered unevenly, growing larger and bolder, conveying a sort of mania, and while Mark didn’t understand their meaning, the words were familiar.

  Rise the Dark the DARK will RISE RiSE the DaRK RiSE rise will RISE the DARK

  The only unexplained words in the notebook that Lauren had left on the passenger seat of her car before she’d stepped out of it on her way to death. As Mark had told the detectives, that was the first time he’d seen the phrase.

  And the last, until now.

  The house was so stifling that he felt dizzy when he moved too fast, but as he read those words he felt a chill. Every time. And he returned to them often. As he searched the rest of the house, he kept interrupting his progress to go back to that room and stare at the wall in the glow of the flashlight.

  Did you see this, baby? Were you here?

  He had to order himself away from that wall, force his attention elsewhere, and elsewhere the hypnotic-eye drawings loomed in every corner, like funhouse mirrors.

  Sweat was dripping down his face and along his spine, but now it felt like the clammy sweat of sickness. He went to wipe his face with his jacket and realized he’d taken it off and wasn’t carrying it any longer. At one point he’d been holding it. Where had he put it? He couldn’t remember. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand instead, and the flashlight beam bobbed crazily around the walls, catching first one spiral drawing and then the next.

  No. Not spirals. You’re using the wrong word.

  That was true. There was a term for the shape in those drawings, and it wasn’t spiral. It was—

  Vortex.

  He heard the word in his own head but it seemed to be spoken in someone else’s voice. It was a sensation he’d had before in a place he didn’t want to remember—endless caverns of damp, dark stone—on a day when he’d been certain he’d never see daylight again. See any kind of light. The voices down there had saved him, though. Maybe. He tried not to think of them often.

  They’re gathering here for something. But what?

  The house provided no answers. Nor did it provide much in the way of tangible evidence of who its occupants were. There were no computers or phones, though there were power cords and chargers; no mail, none of the standard artifacts of modern human existence. The closest thing Mark found was a bookshelf filled with texts that had clearly been read often, and recently. Most of them were books about energy and psychic phenomena, but there was also an investment in the works of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Mark combed through every closet and every drawer and found not a single piece of paper with a name or even a clue as to the identity of the blond woman. Perhaps Dixie Witte—the real Dixie Witte, the one in the guesthouse awaiting him now—would be able to answer that simply enough, but Mark didn’t want to leave the property until he was convinced he’d seen all there was. Once he walked out, he didn’t think he’d be coming back without a subpoena…and, truthfully, he hoped he’d never be back at all. There was something sick about the place.

  Rise the Dark the DARK will RISE RiSE the DaRK RiSE rise will RISE the DARK

  They were words of madness, and yet he stood looking at them again as if he were intending to solve a riddle. He played the light over each wildly painted letter, trying to think of what the phrase might be from. A poem, a song? The look of the word rise reminded him of something, and eventually he got it—the Manson Family. They’d painted the word in blood at the home of their victims. The Tate house. No, not Tate. The second house. The LaBiancas. Husband and wife, butchered in their own home. Rise. The Manson girls had been in that house before. They’d broken in and moved things around, let the dog out, just generally left a sense of intrusion, invasion. Creepy-crawling, they’d called in. That house was where the police had found the words helter skelter too. Had inspiration from that bloody summer of 1969 found its way to Cassadaga? The Manson Family, with their pretty young girls with changed names, new identities.

  I have many brothers, the blond woman had said.

  They come and they go, the boy had told him about the people in the house.

  He moved away from the wall, panning the light from left to right across the room to illuminate those odd drawings, and felt dizzy again.

  Rise the dark. The dark rise.

  Again he heard a voice in his head that was not his own. A male voice, but not one he knew, saying: Too long in here, Markus. Too long. Time to go.

  He pulled away from the wall with an effort, went down the stairs, and noted numbly that his jacket was on the floor in the living room. He gathered that up and was about to head for the front door and escape when he realized that he hadn’t checked the kitchen. He’d been about to when he’d had one of those strange urges to go back upstairs and revisit the bizarre painted words. As bad as he wanted out, he couldn’t go yet. He had to finish the job. See everything there was to see.

  There wasn’t much in the kitchen, but a door there led to a cellar. He hadn’t expected to find a cellar, because houses of that age in Florida usually didn’t have basements. They were built over crawl spaces most often, prepared for tropical rains and flooding. The house at 49B, though, didn’t have a Florida look. It had been built by a Northerner for a Northerner. As soon as Mark opened the door that led downstairs, the air told him why the basement had been a bad idea. The trapped smell of a thousand floods leaked out, a sickeningly sweet mustiness.

  The cellar ceiling was so low that there was no way he could stand up, and he had to go down the bottom steps in an awkward crouch. The confinement, paired with the smell of damp stone, brought back memories of Indiana caves, and he wanted none of those.

  The space was cluttered, stacked with what seemed to be random pieces of machinery, like a salvage yard. It took him a moment to realize what they were—generators. They were all in pieces, disassembled and scattered. Some were so ancient that it was little surprise he hadn’t recognized them at first. The presence of the generators wasn’t so strange—in a place where hurricane season was serious business, you saw a lot of them—but so many in scattered pieces just added another layer of frenzy to the house. It looked as if someone had been frantically trying to assemble one as time was running short.

  There was a special delusion going on in the home, that was clear, but Mark had no sense of exactly what the people who lived here believed.

  Beyond the generator was a workbench, and when Mark moved his light to its surface he saw more metal, but this was different from the generators, clean and gleaming. New.

  He approached it with caution. There were angled pieces of steel on each end of a central piece that looked like a grate or maybe a drain cover, with ribbed bars and gaps between. The angled sections were hinged. He reached out with his flashlight and tapped the center of the object, and the bench seemed to explode.

  The flashlight was torn from his hand and he felt something snap at his finger like a wolf’s teeth and then the flashlight was on the floor, rolling, its beam painting crazy patterns of the generator shadows, and Mark couldn’t see the workbench anymore and didn’t have a damn clue what had happened. It had felt like an explosion, but there was no fuel, and no debris. His heart was thundering and he’d reached for his gun as if he needed to return fire.

  He knelt and found the light and turned it back to the bench, and finally he understood—it was a trap. A literal trap, with a spring-loaded central piece that banged those angled jaws home. If he’d tapped on it with his fist instead of the flashlight, he’d have a broken hand.

  He turned from the device and back toward the stairs and that was when he saw the dead woman.

  She was jammed beneath the short flight of steps, her body pressed into a crevice barely large enough to contain it. He’d walked right over her when he’d entered. Her eyes were o
pen, glittering in the light, bright, but not as bright as the blood that saturated the front of her white dress. Her throat had been slashed, and not long ago—the blood wasn’t entirely dry.

  Mark said, “God, no,” as if he could deny the reality.

  Slow drips of blood plinked down from the gash in her throat and joined the horrific pool below.

  This, Mark thought dully, would be the real Dixie Witte.

  When he’d arrived, the blond woman had seemed startled, legitimately bothered by the fact that he was early for his appointment. Had she emerged from the cellar just a few minutes earlier? Had she smashed the remains of a human life under the steps like so much discarded junk and then gone up and put beer on ice?

  What if you’d been on time? What was supposed to be in the beer? Was that walk to Medicine Wheel Park actually part of the plan, or was she filling time?

  The dead woman’s eyes were fixed on his, and they were the only part of her that seemed to hold a trace of life. He had the disquieting sense that she wished to tell him something, or wished for him to tell her something.

  Did you hold hope, even as you died? Did you watch your own blood fill your hands and, even as you understood that it was too much, too fast, still think that there was a chance?

  I’m glad they shot Lauren, he thought, because he’d read the autopsy reports, read the expert opinions stating that she wouldn’t have known pain. But who in the hell could say that, really? The living could only guess at how it had gone for the dead. There was no such thing as an expert opinion when it came to death.

  He was standing there staring at the corpse when he heard a low, distant rumble like far-off thunder. For a moment he thought that was exactly what it was, the coming of another storm, but the sound remained.

  Not thunder.

  Myron’s truck.

  Shaken back into motion, he straightened and promptly slammed his head into the low ceiling, a teeth-snapping crack; he swore and dipped low again, back into a crouch, and drew his gun. There was a small window in the cellar, right at ground level, that let a small amount of light in. When he went to it, though, the pane was so filthy that it didn’t allow a clear look anywhere, and even if it had, the window faced the backyard. The sound of the truck was coming from the front.

  He turned from the window. The only path of exit was up those steps, right over the dead woman.

  He crossed the basement in an awkward crouch, trying to keep his eyes on the door but not look at the woman, which was impossible. He’d just reached the base of the steps when he heard the front door open.

  He had no idea where his Dixie Witte impostor had gone after she left the house or whether she knew that he’d remained so long. What he did know was that the man who had called himself Myron Pate had probably not been kidding when he promised that the next time he saw Mark, he’d be armed. If Mark stepped out of the cellar now, he’d need to be ready to step out shooting.

  Two voices became audible, one deeper, one softer. Floorboards creaked overhead as heavy footsteps pounded through the ancient house. Mark looked at the dead woman just a few feet from him and a part of him felt as if giving himself up to an exchange of gunfire would be better than waiting down here with her any longer. He could smell the blood now; it seemed to be all he could smell, and he wondered how he’d missed it before. He stepped back, turning his face from her.

  The sounds above grew louder—too loud, thumps of furniture and banging against the walls, and the front door opened and closed and opened and closed again. How many people were they bringing? It sounded like an invasion. Mark blinked sweat out of his eyes, his shoulder beginning to ache from holding the firing position, his gun aimed at the only door they could come through.

  The corpse lay before it like a promise of his fate.

  Upstairs, the front door banged open again and Mark heard a male voice say, “Take this,” and he realized what all the traffic up there was: there weren’t more people entering—they were packing up.

  You’ve flushed them out, he thought. They’re emptying the house, and doing it in a hurry.

  A female voice: “He said to shut it down, and he meant it.”

  Then a new sound, splashing, and Mark was painfully slow in understanding it. He had been listening to it for several seconds, confused, when his nose told him what his ears hadn’t—gasoline.

  Footsteps pounded into the kitchen for the first time, and he tensed his finger on the trigger, but the door didn’t open. The gasoline sloshed against the door and then the footsteps were gone and all that remained was a slow, steady drip at the top of the stairs. The fuel leaked down the steps and trickled onto the dead woman, joining her blood. Mark stared in horrified fascination as a single drop of gasoline landed directly on her open eye, splashing off the cornea but triggering no blink.

  The thundering sound of the truck engine’s starting jerked his attention away. They were ready to leave, and that was both good and bad, because he knew what was coming once they were gone.

  Almost immediately there was a whoosh of ignition, and the closed door at the top of the cellar stairs was outlined in a thin orange line.

  The house was burning on top of him.

  He went up the stairs, crossing over her body. Then he pulled the door open and almost fell back down the stairs in the face of the wave of flames that met him. The kitchen was aglow with fire; flames climbed the walls. Somewhere in the living room, what was left of the gas can exploded, and the blaze that followed it had a flash of blue trapped in the orange and red.

  Mark slammed the door against the heat, and the cellar returned to blackness, but there was heavy smoke already, and he knew time was short.

  He left the stairs and stumbled to the window. It had an iron lock, rusted shut. He hammered on it with the butt of the .38 but made no progress, and the smoke was thickening already, so he gave up on the lock and bashed the butt of the gun into the center of the glass. The old pane fractured but didn’t give, and he swore and smashed it again and this time it broke and he put his hand through the window and over the glass, razoring his thumb open. He balled his jacket in his fist and used that to clear the remains of the glass, then he put his right foot on the old generator nearby, the massive hunk of rusting steel, and stepped up high enough to reach through the small window and get a grip on the exterior wall.

  It was tight, but he’d wormed through tighter spaces in caves in Indiana, and with the fire crackling just behind him, motivation was not an issue. He dragged himself through, leaving thin ribbons of flesh behind as he swept over remnant teeth of glass, and he was on his belly in the grass, gasping for air, when he saw a figure just ahead. He fumbled to get his gun upright and had nearly pulled the trigger when he recognized the boy from the orange tree, illuminated by the flames. He was offering a hand.

  Mark accepted it and the boy helped him to his feet and they stumbled away together as a window blew out somewhere upstairs and the fire roared through the old house.

  “It wasn’t me,” Mark said.

  “I know.” The boy released him and stepped aside, regarding the burning home with curiosity but no evident fear. “I saw them. I didn’t know you were inside, though. I saw them with the gas cans.”

  A siren rose over the sound of the flames and they both turned toward it. No emergency lights were visible yet, just the sound. The flames cast flickering orange glows over the palm leaves but out beyond the village was dark.

  “I think they hurt Dixie,” the boy said.

  “Yes,” Mark said. “They hurt her.” He rubbed his eyes as if to remove the image of the woman’s body jammed indifferently under the cellar stairs. “Do you know who they are?”

  The boy shook his head. “No, but they said the name you asked about before. The strange one.”

  “Garland?”

  “That’s it. They’re going to him now.”

  “Where?”

  “They didn’t say a place. And they said another name too. Eli.”

&
nbsp; Eli. It meant nothing to Mark. He said, “Do they work for Garland, is that it? Is he in charge?”

  “No. The one named Eli is in charge.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I just am. I know things, sometimes. Everyone here does. One day I’ll be better at it than I am now. But I know some things already. Eli is the worst one.” The boy was backing up as the flames grew taller and hotter. “He’s very bad.”

  Mark had trouble imagining anyone worse than Garland Webb, but he nodded and said, “Okay. Thank you for telling me. And wait, please. I need something from you. Please, it’s important.” He fumbled in his pocket with a bloody hand. “Son, I need you to take something for me and keep it until I’m back. Can you do that? It’s very important. It will help me find them and stop them from hurting anyone else.”

  He extended his cell phone with its photographs of the red truck’s license plate from earlier in the afternoon. He didn’t want to have it on him when the police came, didn’t want to have to explain any of the photos. He needed a head start. The boy regarded it suspiciously.

  “Why don’t you give it to the police?”

  “Because I need to find those people before the police do.”

  The boy looked into Mark’s eyes for a second and then turned his chin slightly, his gaze drifting up and over Mark’s shoulder.

  “I shouldn’t do it, but Walter says it’s fine.”

  A few short hours ago Mark would have told the boy to stop telling his tales about ghosts. Now he said, “Listen to Walter, son. It sounds like he knows something about what happens when bad people stay out of prison.”

  By the time the police arrived, the boy had pocketed the phone and was standing in the shadows just outside the circle of firelight, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered.