People of the Dark

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by Wright, T. M.




  THE PEOPLE OF THE DARK

  T.M. Wright

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / T.M. Wright

  Copy-edited by: David Dodd

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Background Images provided by:

  http://ashensorrow.deviantart.com

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS PRODUCTS BY T.M. WRIGHT:

  NOVELS:

  The Strange Seed Series

  STRANGE SEED

  NURSERY TALE

  THE PEOPLE OF THE DARK

  THE LAUGHING MAN

  The Biergarten Series

  THE CHANGING

  THE DEVOURING

  GOODLOW'S GHOSTS

  THE ASCENDING

  SLEEPEASY

  The Manhattan Ghost Story Series

  THE WAITING ROOM

  A SPIDER ON MY TONGUE

  Standalone Novels

  BOUNDARIES

  NON FICTION:

  THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO U.F.O.s

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY – NARRATED BY DICK HILL

  THE CHANGING – NARRATED BY ANDREW RANDALL

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  DEDICATION

  With love, for Chris

  When I was a boy of eleven or twelve I was walking alone at dusk through a heavily wooded park near my home. It was a park I'd walked through almost every evening on my way home from school and I felt at ease in it, even when the light was failing and the whisper of an evening chill was in the air. Above the hulking, dark and ragged line of the trees, the sky always had the pale yellow glow of the city splattered on it, and every now and then I could hear the blare of a car horn, or a dog barking, or, depending on if I was near the perimeter of the park, a family argument erupting out of nowhere. These were comforting sights and sounds because they told me that civilization was close by, that I was not alone, after all, though, if I wanted, I could pretend that I was alone. And that was something I pretended quite a lot. Because being alone, in the woods, in the dark, was spooky, and spooky was fun.

  That's what I was doing that night when I was eleven or twelve, and coming home through the park at dusk. I was pretending that I was alone, that the park was a vast and uncorrupted wilderness, that there were no houses within shouting distance, and no city lights painting the dusk a grimy yellow. I was pretending that there were bears close by, and bobcats, foxes, moose, rattlesnakes. I was transporting myself to a place where the earth itself was not just many things—friend, enemy, mother—it was the only thing.

  And on that particular early evening when I was eleven or twelve, I sat down in a clearing surrounded by evergreens and thickets to watch the night come. I remember I was hungry because the lunch that day in school had been something awful—peanut butter sandwiches on Wonder Bread, with carrot salad as a side dish—so I'd skipped it. And, as well, the beginnings of a cold were moving about in my blood. But I was something of a dreamer, and I was young, so there was very little that could stop me from doing what I wanted to do.

  It was a Friday; I had that small and special kind of happiness that comes only to school kids on Fridays, when two whole days of freedom have opened up before them. And I remember that it was early in the school year, September, probably, because the evening was warm, and humid; I could hear mosquitoes whining in the air around me, and that got me to thinking that the bats soon would come to eat them. I didn't like bats, but the idea that soon they'd be silently scooping up their evening meal in the air above me gave me only a passing shiver.

  That particular clearing was one I'd paused in a couple of dozen times before. It was rimmed by tall evergreens, a few venerable old maples, and one immense and dying oak whose branches already were nearly bare of leaves.

  It was from behind the dark trunk of that oak—visible only as a patchy, black presence against the backdrop of gathering darkness—that a child appeared and swept toward me with his arms wide and, when he was only a couple of feet away, and I could see him more clearly, a look of immense desperation and pleading on his face. Then he was gone.

  STRANGE SEED

  Realization, like punishment, comes swiftly to the child. And, as to punishment, he winces and stifles a moan. Here, in the bright sunlight, denial is impossible. He sees that his father's body is becoming what swamps are made of, and soil is made of—becoming food for the horsetail, and clover, and burying beetles, and a million others. Because the earth, the breathing earth, must be constantly nourished.

  His father's words are closer now, and understandable. "Decay is not the grim thing it appears to be. It is renewal."

  "Father?" the child pleads, realizing the futility of the word. "Father?" he repeats, more in memory of those times his father responded to the word than for any other reason.

  Father?—distantly, from the thickets to the south. Father? Barely audible.

  The child looks questioningly up from his father's body. "Father?" he calls.

  Father?

  An echo, the child thinks. Months before, he remembers, in the heart of the forest, "Hello," extended, "Hello," repeated, "Hello," shouted back at both of them, father and son, by the voices of the forest.

  "Hello," the child calls.

  Father? replies the voice of the thickets.

  "Hello," the child calls. And distantly, from the east, from the forest, "Hello, Hello, Hello," decreasing in intensity. And finally, nothing.

  Hello—from the thickets.

  "Hello," the child calls.

  Hello.

  "Hello, Father!" the child calls.

  And the forest replies, "Hello, Father! Hello, Father!—

  And the voice of the thickets replies, Hello, Father! Father? Hello!

  NURSERY TALE

  The first three young couples in Granada—the Meades, the McIntyres, the Wentises—were very much of a type, it was true. Bright young suburbanites with a taste for getting ahead, who liked being looked upon as "special," but who tried, to varying degrees, to carry that perception of status with humility. They all gave generously to the proper charities, they all belonged to one of the two major political parties, the men all held white-collar jobs. Which is not to say that these couples were indistinguishable, one from another. . . .

  The McIntyres, the Meades, and the Wentises came to Granada in pursuit of a dream. They believed what the brochure had told them about "open spaces and room to breathe—all within the framework of a secure, planned community" because that was what modern living was all about. It was their birthright, wasn't it, to seek out what was most comfortable, and easy.

  That was the dream, after all.

  And all of them were dreamers.

  THE CHILDREN OF THE ISLAND

  And on the Upper West Side, in a law office on West 110th Street, the newly installed junior partner of the law firm of Johnson, Bigny and Belles, a young woman named Karen Gears looked up from her work at a window which faced south and one word escaped her, "No!" It was a plea, a word of desperation—keep the dreams awa
y, lock them up in her childhood, where they belonged, where, indeed, they had begun, and where she had supposed they had ended. . . .

  On the fringes of the West Village, in lower Manhattan, a good-looking, dark-haired, gray-eyed boy was lying on his back on his bed. The lights were out, the shades and curtains drawn. He had always liked darkness.

  He was remembering that just two days before, he had somehow gotten Christine Basile, of all people, to agree to go out with him. He was remembering, also, that barely a month before, he'd celebrated a birthday. His sixteenth, he'd been told. The man who called himself his father had given him an extra set of keys to the car.

  The boy was weeping now, and he was whispering to himself, "What a crock of shit, what a damned crock of shit!" . . .

  In Manhattan, on West Tenth Street, in a small bachelor apartment which had been decorated very tastefully in earth tones, and included a wicker loveseat, bamboo shades, and a large, well-maintained freshwater aquarium, a man named Philip Case—who was apparently in his early thirties—was holding his head and tightly gritting his teeth, trying futilely to shut out the images that came to him in waves, like a tide filled with bad memories. . . .

  There were a hundred or more Philip Cases in Manhattan that night. A hundred or more Karen Gears. A hundred or more boys lying in their darkened rooms and trying desperately to recall the events of just one or two days before. Because such events were their reality, and reality was rapidly slipping away from them. . . .

  They had become what they had lived amongst. They had grown apart from the earth, because they had rarely touched it.

  They had grown secure in what they'd become, and so had tossed aside what they had been. In stark desperation they had discarded it, and forgotten it. Because it was impossible to be both what they were, and what they had changed themselves into.

  I have snapshots of Erika when she was a child. Most of them are in black and white, though some are in color, and I say to myself when I look at them, Yes, I can see the woman here, in this child; she hasn't changed much. Her face got a little narrower, perhaps—she grew taller, her body matured. But the woman dwelt there. I think it's a comfortable lie to tell myself, though I'm not sure that it is a lie. If it is, I want desperately to believe it.

  One of these photographs, one in black and white, shows Erika at what appears to be the age of ten or eleven. She's standing with her left arm around a boy who's about the same age; his name, she says, was Timothy. He could easily have been her twin. They were about the same height; both had dark hair and darkish skin, and they shared the same pixieish look, as if they had wings on their backs.

  "What happened to him?" I asked her once.

  She shrugged. "What happens to anyone, Jack? He grew up, he got married. I think he's a plumber, maybe he's an electrician. I haven't seen him in years."

  Another of the photographs shows Erika and her mother cheek to cheek. The photograph was obviously taken in one of those booths where a series of black-and-white shots can be had for a dollar or two. Erika's mother is smiling broadly, and Erika is smiling broadly, though her face is blurred a little, as if she turned her head when the shutter clicked. She told me she was fourteen when the photograph was taken, and that her mother died a month later—"It was a car crash, Jack. My father died too. They're buried together." She smiled, embarrassed. "Well, not together, really. Side by side."

  I have several baby pictures of Erika. One is an 8 X 10 color portrait done at Sears, another is a small snapshot commemorating her first visit to the beach: She's sitting in a tiny, two-ring inflatable pool; an adult's arm is jutting in from the left side of the snapshot, the hand apparently on her back, holding her up in the pool. The beach is behind her.

  Erika is twenty-six years old, short, dark-skinned, dark-haired. Her eyes are very large and are a rich, earthy brown in color. Her face is oval, her nose small and straight, her lips full. It is a memorable face not only because it is so marvelous to look at but also because it has something undefinable in it, as if the brain behind it is holding onto knowledge or memory that it must desperately keep to itself. That's why she often looks bemused, I think.

  She tells jokes on occasion. Some of them are dirty and some of them are clean, and some of them display an incredible naïveté, as if she has, as an adult, just discovered jokes that were extant when the rest of us were children. "I'm going to make rice and updoc for dinner, Jack," she said once.

  "You're going to make what?" I asked.

  "Rice and updoc," she repeated.

  So I fell for it. "What's updoc?" I said, which elicited a full minute of wonderful childlike laughter from her.

  She has no brothers or sisters. She remembers her parents were anguished over that because they very much wanted other children. "They kept trying, Jack," she told me. "And it wasn't that my mother couldn't get pregnant. She could. She got pregnant a half-dozen times anyway. The trouble was, she miscarried a half-dozen times, too." Erika has told me that more than once, always in the same words. And she always adds, her voice low and thoughtful, "It's really too bad, isn't it? I would like to have had some brothers and sisters. I think my childhood would seem fuller if I'd had some brothers and sisters." She pauses, looks quizzically at me. "I remember so awfully little from my childhood, Jack. Is it that way with you?"

  I tell her, "Sure it is. I think it's that way with everyone," which is a lie, of course.

  Erika and I have been married for six years. It's the first marriage for both of us, and we went into it good and starry-eyed; we would have looked just like the bride and groom on a wedding cake had we had a traditional ceremony, but we didn't. We were married at a place called Sonnenburg Gardens, in Canandaigua, New York. It's a sprawling three-story mansion with a red-slate roof, and it's surrounded by thirty acres of meticulously cared-for gardens. Erika loved it—I thought it was okay, if a bit overstylized—and when she learned that marriages could be performed there, she was ecstatic.

  She loves to get her hands into the earth, loves the smell of it, the texture of it. And she loves the things that spring from the earth; she says she feels a kinship with them. I tell her I do too, and that's the truth. But I know she means something deeper than I mean. I know that now, especially.

  She wears no perfume. She has a smell all her own, which is vaguely, and faintly, like the smell of sweet butter. It's especially noticeable when we make love. I think it's in her sweat, and I enjoy it because, of course, it reminds me of her. It lingers. It's on her clothes; it's on the chair she uses most often. It fades after a time. Then her clothes and her favorite chair become simple and inanimate and uninteresting.

  It's in the walls, too, where it's extremely tenacious. And it's in the garden she started. And when I smell it here and there on our land, I stop and I enjoy it.

  She looks especially good in blue and in green, which complement her dark hair, darkish skin, and brown eyes.

  She likes ginger ale, black coffee, tuna fish on whole wheat, Humphrey Bogart movies, most of Woody Allen, none of Sidney Sheldon.

  And she scares easily, laughs a lot, is afraid of the dark, likes to be hugged, wears comfortable shoes, is a sucker for a salesman, dynamite in a bathing suit, allergic to penicillin.

  I am happy with her. I'll always be happy with her.

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  When Erika and I moved into our farmhouse, we knew that there was a leak where the line from the well—seven hundred feet up what we used to call "our mountain"—entered the basement. We were told by a local contractor that the leak was caused by an underground stream and that the only way to fix it would be to have a trench dug around the perimeter of the house, then to have the trench lined with ceramic tile and PVC pipe. He said it would divert the stream, and we said okay.

  He subcontracted the job to a man named Jim Sandy, who came to the house on a bright and unusually warm afternoon early in December, took himself on a quick walking tour of the area he was going to be digging up,
then came back into the house to give me an estimate. I showed him to the kitchen, sat him down at the table, made him some coffee. He put lots of sugar in it, then sipped it delicately.

  I sat kitty-corner to him at the table, with my own coffee. "What's the verdict?" I said.

  "Lots of rocks in there," he said. "Rocks and hard clay. It's damn difficult to dig through rocks and hard clay."

  "Yes," I said. "I imagine it is."

  "Five hundred dollars," he said. He was a short, thin man, with grayish skin and bad teeth. He was wearing a threadbare blue denim jacket, a red flannel shirt, black pants, Timberland boots, and an oil-stained orange cap with the word CHALMERS imprinted on it.

  "Five hundred dollars is a lot of money," I told him.

  "You get what you pay for," he said, which surprised me—I had supposed, from looking at him, that he'd haggle. He took another sip of coffee, a noisy one, and repeated, "You get what you pay for."

  He smelled vaguely of wood smoke thickly overlaid by a cheap aftershave that I supposed he'd splashed on to cover the odor of the wood smoke. Whenever he put his cup of coffee down, he scratched idly at the inside of his elbow and cursed beneath his breath.

  "How about three hundred?" I said.

  He grinned, took another sip of coffee, set the cup down. "Three hundred'll get me here," he said, still grinning. "And five hundred'll get the job done."

  I thought a moment, then shrugged. "Okay," I said.

  He scratched his elbow, cursed, shook my hand firmly, and told me he'd be back a week later. He said that the job would take a full day.

 

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