by Barry Napier
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Barry Napier
THE DEAD MAN logo is a registered trademark of Adventures in Television Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
PO Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
eISBN: 9781477898109
CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1
She’d been in bed for so long that it seemed unnatural to be standing again. Her old, aching knees felt fifty years younger and the lungs that had hindered her lifestyle for the last year or so seemed reinvigorated as she inhaled the crisp afternoon air. When she breathed the clean air in, it made her body feel plump, a far cry from the frail state she had last seen herself in.
She was young and beautiful and strong again. Every movement sent a shiver of pleasure through her body. She wore a sundress and smelled of jasmine. The smell was pushed out ahead of her by the country breeze at her back. She walked through her own scent as she made her way over the gentle rise of an impossibly green hill. She knew the man she walked with was smelling it, too and it made her smile.
She glanced down the hill and saw the dirt track that would lead her home. The sunset cast out shades of subtle gold that seemed to be sewn into the ditches along the track. God, it was such a beautiful day. If she’d had another glass of wine with her lunch earlier, she would have given him her virginity. The thought made her tremble inside, and she felt an anxiousness in that place that her mother told her was supposed to be only for the man she married.
As they neared the dirt road, she realized that her fiancé was still walking beside her. “Do you want me to walk you home?” he asked.
“I’m a big girl. I think I’ll be okay.”
He leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. He tasted like salt, and she knew that the taste of wine was still lingering on her own lips. When their tongues touched, she felt that creeping need once again. She broke the kiss and smiled at him.
“Can I see you tomorrow?” he asked.
She nodded and gave him another kiss, this one on the cheek, and turned away from him.
A few steps down the road, she paused. Up ahead she could see the framing of a fence, like a giant crooked spine springing from the ground. She felt the slightest bit of uncertainty and the fear caused her to turn back towards her fiancé.
He was headed down the road, his shoulder hunched like a defeated man’s and his hat once again on his head. She smiled briefly at him and then, in a blur of motion that exists only in dreams, she found herself standing by the fence. The man she had been expecting stood there as if he had been there all along.
“How do?” she said.
The man grinned with crooked teeth. He looked as if he might be a bit uncomfortable, but he never took his eyes off her. He didn’t speak to her, only looked her up and down. He was covered in grays and blacks, a dark man sprung directly from the shadows of her dreams and memories.
She felt her heart pulling in two directions, one wanting to retreat back down the dirt trail, the other wanting to stay here with this man, to venture into that old abandoned white farmhouse with him and learn his secrets.
Without a word, the man bowed slightly to her in a sign of chivalry. The gesture made no sense to her, but she instantly felt an irrational fear spreading through her. When he bowed, she saw the top of his head, scabbed and peeling.
And then the smell of it hit her.
Something dead… the smell of a gutted animal left to rot in the woods in the summer. The smell was overpowering, and she thought that it might be coming from the man at the fence—a man who was very familiar to her.
“Why are you here?” she asked him. “I know this is just a dream. I know I am old and dying in the real world. Why are you here? You aren’t the dark man… You’re someone else. But I have seen you… Oh yes, I have seen you.”
When he opened his mouth to speak, she saw his teeth again. They were misshapen, slightly yellowed. Sharp.
“Yes, you have,” he said, his voice like a spring breeze. “And I am here now to let you know that it is almost time to return what you took.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m coming,” he said to her with a smile.
Then a scream rose in her throat and she opened her eyes to a white ceiling, dreary walls, and poor light. A plastic tube brushed against her shoulder where a small patch of her dry skin was exposed by the yellow hospital gown she wore. The tube traveled upward, into her nose, and then in the opposite direction, over the side of the bed and into a machine that hummed patiently.
“Momma, what is it?”
She looked over and saw Chester. His graying hair was frazzled, and the poor boy looked as if he hadn’t slept in ages. And behind her son, something else. A shape. His shape.
She screamed again. She kept screaming until two nurses came into the room and gave her an injection, which calmed her almost immediately.
“Chester,” she said, so softly that she didn’t know if he had heard her. “Don’t let him in,” she told her son. “Keep him out… the man at the fence. He’s coming…”
2
In the course of his quest across America, Matt Cahill had acquired the talents of a well-traveled man. He could take one look at a diner and tell whether or not the food was any good. He had a knack for finding run-down motels with great rates and surprisingly nice rooms. He’d even come to understand the art of the small-town newspaper, complete with JV sports scores, overly political letters to the editor, and “This Week’s Winning Recipe” (or other similarly titled columns tucked away on the last page out of obligation and not editorial need).
It was in these same sorts of papers that he had also developed the ability to tell if he was on the right track or not. The grisly little headlines about violence and murder were always splashed on the front page—anything to revive the pulse of a small town—and not hard to find. Still, Matt had the ability to read these articles and decide whether or not he was nearing the presence of the evil he had spent a great deal of his time chasing.
He was holding such a paper, reading one of those horrendous headlines, as he sat on the small park bench in Steeple, Virginia. He’d learned about Steeple yesterday after buying a paper in the bus stop in Richmond. There, of course, the headline hadn’t been as pronounced as it was here in Steeple, but it had still grabbed his attention.
More than that, the content of the article had him hitching a ride to Steeple right away. And here was that same story in the Steeple paper. Chester Clark, the top salesman at Steeple Auto and the scion of one of Steeples’ best families, walked into work one morning, said hello to the receptionist, and then strolled cheerfully into the service area, where he proceeded to kill everyone there with a pneumatic drill, a tire iron, a wrench, a pocketknife, and his teeth. When he was done, he jammed the drill though his own temple, killing himself instantly.
As brutal as this part of the story was, the r
eporter saved the worst part for the end: This was Steeple’s third such act of random, inexplicable violence in the last six weeks.
Matt sighed, folding the paper and tucking it beneath his arm. He studied the town from the bench, watching the trickle of late afternoon traffic. Steeple was a small rural town with a population of twenty-five hundred or so, according to the church-white sign he had spied along the town limits.
He knew he should get started right away. Of course, with the only person exhibiting violent tendencies now dead, it was hard to tell where he needed to start. He stood up and looked up and down the streets for any indication of what to do next. He saw two kids dressed in baggy clothes kicking a skateboard around the curb and a man cleaning the exterior windows of a mom-and-pop convenience store. It looked like a Rockwell painting come alive, but Matt couldn’t help but feel there was something flawed about the canvas underneath. The news story about Chester Clark was proof of this.
A yawn escaped his mouth and his shoulders drooped. He was exhausted but tried to ignore it. The bus rides he’d had over the last few days had supplied him with ample time to sleep, but it had always been broken naps. It was almost as if his mind knew there was something on the horizon, something waiting for him. There was work to be done here in Steeple—he was certain of that. That was another thing he had gotten good at—feeling the presence of the evil he had come to know so well. It clung to the air like invisible smog and tended to grow thicker by the day.
There were only two places to stay in the entire town, he quickly discovered. There was a bed-and-breakfast on the outskirts of town that was well out of his price range. Then, located in the center of the gray, urban part of Steeple was a motel that looked like every other run-down motel he’d slept in lately: a bright orange neon sign, gold room numbers on red doors, and a lobby that smelled like fast food and sweaty feet. With the transaction made and a key in his hand, Matt entered his room, tossed his bag on the floor, and hit the bed.
He craned his neck and looked towards the bathroom, contemplating a bath. The thought of hot water was a relaxing one, but his body refused to move. He kicked off his boots and grabbed the TV remote from the bedside table. He clicked the TV on and was treated to a rerun of Friends.
He was dead asleep before the first commercial break. When a trio of police cars passed by two hours later, sirens shrieking into the night, Matt didn’t so much as stir.
3
He was standing in a forest, right at the edge of the tree line where the woods gave way to a Crayola-green field. The field before him seemed to stretch out forever to both sides. A pale dirt road ran through its center, and as Matt saw this road, he knew that he was not supposed to travel it.
No, his interest was just past the road, to the large white Colonial-style house on the other side. Blooming rosebushes sat at the front corners of the house. Even from a distance of what Matt assumed to be at least fifty yards, he could smell them on the breeze. A swing hung from the large porch, waiting for someone to take a seat. A charming white fence ran along both sides of the yard, separating it from the dirt road.
As inviting as the house seemed, Matt knew that the house was not meant to be his focal point, either—not completely. What drew him was the small group of girls standing in the front yard. There were five of them, between the ages of seven and nine. They were holding hands and dancing in a circle, jumping into the air in the kind of happy little skips that only young girls are capable of.
Their clothes seemed peculiar to Matt, layered and heavy and too formal for play. This dream must be a scene from decades ago, the thirties or forties possibly.
From his place among the trees, Matt could hear the girls clearly, as if they were chanting cheerfully right next to him. “They put me in the dark, cold ground. I was still alive but made no sound. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. The worms they crawl all about…”
As he watched the girls, he caught movement above them. In one of the house’s upper rooms, someone looked down onto the yard from behind a window. The figure was looking directly towards the girls, its face distorted by rippling glass and reflected sunlight. Matt couldn’t make out features, but there was something sinister about that presence. Something dark.
“… They put me in the dark, cold ground…”
Matt looked back to the girls. They were no longer as young as they had been moments before. Now they looked to be twelve or so, just beginning to flirt with adolescence. They were sitting in single file now, staring directly at the house.
Dream-Matt grew concerned as the girls stared ahead, motionless. Their rhyme kept swirling in his head, and it made him shudder.
“… The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…”
He stepped out of the woods. As soon as his feet touched the pristine field, dream-Matt felt as if he was being pushed forward. The house and the five girls drew closer with alarming speed. He gasped as he suddenly found himself standing behind them. He looked up to the window and saw the dark figure standing there, the face still hard to see. The shape seemed to be waving at him, and he had little doubt that it was Mr. Dark. Matt looked back down to the girls and took a frightened step back.
One of them had turned to look at him. Her eyes were pitch-black, and when she smiled at him, her teeth were rotting gray chips. She reached out to him, her hand as delicate as the roses growing along the side of the house. She opened her mouth to speak, but instead of words, blood came pouring out in a great crimson gush.
Matt screamed, and the other girls turned to him with those same wretched smiles on their pretty faces.
4
Matt woke up sweating. His heart was like thunder in his chest and he was not at all ashamed when he caught himself looking around the motel room for any sign of the girls from his dream. The digital clock by the bed read 4:10 a.m.
The TV was still on, now showing Kevin Arnold’s pursuit of Winnie on The Wonder Years. He sat up and tried his best to recall every fragment of the dream. It came to him slowly, and he wasn’t sure what aspect of it haunted him the most: the horrid smiles on those girls’ faces or the figure standing in the window on the second floor. While there had been no visible features, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to assume it had been the bastard he’d been pursuing for so long.
Mr. Dark.
Matt stared blankly at the television before finally shutting it off. He lay back down but knew within seconds that he wouldn’t be going back to sleep. He kept seeing the blurry image in the second-floor window of the house from his dream. And there was Mr. Dark, staring at him from the window.
By the time he got dressed, it was just after five thirty. Might as well get out and get the lay of the land. Steeple wasn’t a big town, but it gave way to rural stretches he assumed led farther back before they reached the town limits. There might be more ground to cover here than he had expected.
With his bag slung over his shoulder, he headed out. Dawn was just beginning to tease the downtown portion of Steeple. There were only a few vehicles out, mostly work trucks. He walked back towards the center of town and was pleased to find a small diner. If he couldn’t sleep, at least he could eat.
Two old men sat in a far booth talking about how they would fix the economy. A lonely man sat by himself at a table, sipping coffee and reading a newspaper.
Matt took a seat, sliding his bag under the table. When a gruff-looking waitress came by, Matt ordered a western omelet and a cup of coffee. As he waited, he pulled yesterday’s newspaper out of his bag. If he did indeed plan on sticking around Steeple, he’d need to find some work. After paying for the motel and the breakfast, his funds would be dangerously low.
The classified ads in the Steeple Messenger were brief: The help-wanted ads took up only a column and a half. The only job he saw that was part-time and required no real qualifications was for what the ad called a “Custodian/Handyman/Jack-of-All-Trades.” The position was needed at Steeple Assisted Living and was—
Seeing this,
Matt flipped back a few pages. He found the article on Chester Clark and reread it. He flashed past the portions about the violence and went straight to the end, to the few sentences he had simply skimmed over before.
Chester Clark was 52 years of age. He is survived by his mother, Gloria Clark. Mrs. Gloria Clark is well-known throughout Steeple due to her donations and contributions to the groundbreaking of Steeple Assisted Living, of which she is currently a resident.
Despite the rigorous and often tormenting toll his pursuits took on him, there were occasions when things seemed to work out to his advantage. By applying for the job (“show up in person whenever available,” the ad said), he might get a chance to speak with Gloria Clark and maybe find out just what happened to her son to cause him to go on a killing spree. From there, perhaps he’d be able to find a source for the evil he felt in the town.
Folding the paper back up, he realized that he could feel it even in the diner. As the waitress brought his coffee, Matt looked to the other three patrons. He saw no sign of the rot he’d grown so familiar with. Other than some mildly racist remarks coming from the elderly men at work on fixing the nation, there seemed to be nothing alarming.
Matt ate his omelet when it came and downed a few more cups of coffee. It was nearly seven when he found himself back in the central hub of Steeple. He passed the park where he had sat yesterday afternoon and noticed that the town had finally stirred awake. Morning traffic thickened as people started milling out to their jobs.
With each step, he felt the undeniable pressure of something wrong, of something gone bad. He could almost smell it on the air, like the skunk that’s been smeared on the side of the road for a week. It seemed to tag along as every step took him closer to the nursing home.
5
Steeple Assisted Living was a massive structure unlike any nursing home Matt had ever seen. Four floors high and elegantly designed after the grand spas of old Europe, it seemed alien set against the rest of Steeple. Rose gardens wrapped around both sides, and a large fountain sat at the head of the sidewalk leading to the front door. A wall of immaculate hedges stood roughly ten feet high, blocking out the surrounding sights of local businesses to the east and a vacant lot to the west.