When the Darkness Falls
Page 1
Table of Contents
Introduction: Here We Go Again
Desire
Menage A Trois
Out of the Cradle
Mummy
Riding the Storm Out
The Watcher From the Grave
Sending Them Home
Finding the Flame
Offices
Going Home
The Lingering Scent of Brimstone
Addict
What Happened At Forest Green Cemetery
Girlfriend
Story Notes
About J. F. Gonzalez
Also by J. F. Gonzalez
Acknowledgements
Copyright
WHEN THE DARKNESS FALLS
Introduction:
Here We Go Again
DATELINE, LANCASTER, PA – June 16, 2005
So here we are, four years after I began assembling my last short story collection Old Ghosts and Other Revenants, with a batch of new stories that have been published since then.
In the three years since Old Ghosts and Other Revenants was published, I’ve had probably a dozen new stories appear and another half dozen awaiting publication. I’ve also had four original novels published; well, actually five if you count one that is currently out in the marketplace under a phony name (my lips are sealed on that for reasons I won’t go into here).
In 2001 when my first collection was compiled, all of my novels had been published exclusively within the small press. Fast forward to the day I write this and, of the five additional novels that have been published, two have been bought for mass market paperback reprint by Leisure.
There’s been film interest in one of those novels—Survivor.
Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it?
I'VE JUST MADE an initial list of the stories that I intend to include in this book. Keeping in mind that it won’t be published until probably late 2006, it will be interesting to see what the final contents are. For now, here is what I have in mind.
Epiphany
Desire
The Lingering Scent of Brimstone
House of the Damned
Sending Them Home
Girlfriend
Riding the Storm Out
Choices
Mummy
Going Home
Old Ghosts
What Happened at Forest Green Cemetery
First Born
Web of Deceit
A New Life
Love Hurts
Playing the Game
That's a pretty nice list, don’t you think? Six of these stories appear in my previous collection Old Ghosts and Other Revenants, but that title is now out of print. As of this writing, my reasoning for including them here in this collection is to provide you with a sample of that particular book. You will see that the majority of the remaining tales comprise of those published from 2002 onward. I expect to have no less than three new tales appear in 2005 and I am currently writing three other stories for anthologies that are slated to appear in 2006 and beyond. That doesn’t count the other stories I’ve written I haven’t mentioned–written on spec–that I’ve submitted to magazines that may be published prior to this collection’s appearance. This means there’s a chance that the contents of this book may change.
It will be interesting to see how this shapes up. That’s why I put my initial notes on the compilation of this collection in this introduction. It gives you, the reader, a chance to see how a writer makes their decision on what stories to include in a short story collection. With me, I prefer to select a variety of tales regardless of theme, written over a specific period of time. Some are personal favorites, others ranked high with my readers. In this case I’m toying seriously with including some material that overlaps with another collection, now out of print, as well as material published after that collection.
But we have a way to go until this collection sees print, so let’s stop now and see where things pick up in a year from now.
DATELINE, FEBURARY 20, 2006
As you’ve no doubt noticed from the Table of Contents of this collection, the material in this volume has changed. Gone are the older stories from Old Ghosts and Other Revenants in favor of more recent stories. I’ve also thrown in a long novella that was published in 2000 that I felt fit. This was a piece that would have appeared in Old Ghosts had there not been space considerations.
As a whole, I’m pleased with the final selection of these stories. They run from science fiction, to supernatural horror, to intense tales of psychological horror ala Survivor (my novel, not the “reality” show of the same name). I’m all over the place with my fiction, and this collection is a reflection of that.
Short stories remain my favorite literary form to write. I’m also a fan of them as a reader. I probably write three or four original stories a year, regardless of anthology invitation. Of course, it’s always nice to have a market already lined up when beginning such a tale and thankfully a handful of these tales were written to order. I’ve included a special piece at the end of this collection detailing how each story was written that will probably be interesting for those who like this kind of thing. For the rest of you, well, you have the stories. And isn’t that why you’re here?
J. F. Gonzalez
Lititz, PA,
February 20, 2006
Desire
I RECENTLY HAD sex with Gloria, my wife of forty years. I never thought we’d have a physical relationship ever again.
After all, she’s been dead for five years.
This seems like an unlikely method of writing down the events that have recently taken place in my life, but I want whoever reads this–homicide detectives and the forensic guys–to understand what has happened.
I want it made known that I loved my family. I loved my wife. I desired her above all other women; I never once cheated on her, never once had amorous thoughts towards another woman throughout our marriage. I loved the two wonderful children we produced and raised together. I loved my grandchildren. Just know this, okay?
Know one other thing, too. If you do read this document, go into my office and find a file in the right hand drawer of my desk with the label “Haynes Vs. State of California, 1998” on it. Read the material in that file, and the one after that which is labeled “Related cases.”
Don’t even bother trying to find the black box. You won’t find it. As I write this I can see it on the living room floor, but I’ll be willing to bet it will be gone when you read this. You won’t find it in the trash, either. It’ll simply be gone. I’ve gone ahead and shot a photo of it on the digital camera (which I’ll leave on the table), but I’m willing to bet it won’t show up in the photos. Likewise, I’m willing to bet the clerk at Bill’s Video and Books on Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana will have no knowledge of ever selling me a sex doll called “Dream Girl”.
Nor will you find any other adult video/book merchant in the country who will claim to stock it.
And if you probe further like I did, you might hear the stories, which might tempt you into exploring further.
You probably won’t get anywhere.
Then again, you might come across it somewhere.
That might validate what I’m about to write here.
However, if you do find the doll and are tempted to purchase it, this might lead you to where I’m at now.
Contemplating.
God, what did I get into?
Already the smell is starting to get to me. If I’m found like this, dead by my own hand, with Gloria here...well, they’ll think I’ve been sleeping with the dead and I want to confess right here and now that is not the case. I’m not a necrophile. You’ll find that hard to believe if I win this battle,
but at least my children and grandchildren will be safe, even if they have to live with knowing that the physical evidence points to that perversity, as well as my implied madness.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning. First, I’m going to get the bottle of Jack Daniel’s I have at the bar and the .45 Caliber Colt. I’ll need both of them.
If I win, I’ll save the Colt for the end.
I RETIRED FROM the Pasadena Police Department in August of 1998 with a full pension and a nice 401k plan. I had joined the LAPD in October of 1959 and saw a lot during my service. Gloria and I had only been married for two years and had a one-year old son when the Watts Riots broke out. I was on duty when that happened, and Gloria had been frantic throughout that troubling week of unrest. I don’t know how I made it through myself, but somehow I did. I quickly rose up the ranks from beat cop to homicide detective in 1969. I was made Chief of Homicide in 1975, and in 1982 I took a job with the Pasadena Police Department as a Homicide Detective. I took the job because I wanted to be back in the field again. Being Chief of Homicide was nice, but it meant staying behind a desk most of the time. I enjoyed the hunt too much.
One of my last cases seemed pretty open-and-shut at first glance. You may remember it: in April of 1998 a middle-aged man named Martin Haynes gunned down his wife in the bedroom of their sprawling ranch house in Pasadena with a .22 caliber pistol he had bought fifteen years before. He had lain in wait for her on a Sunday afternoon and picked her off when she entered their bedroom. He’d shot her five times, killing her instantly. Then he’d waited for the police to show up.
I was the lead detective on the case, and questioned him later at the station. He claimed that he never sat down to wait for the police, which is what it appeared when the first officers arrived. He had been waiting for his girlfriend, some woman named Brandy, to show up. He claimed that he’d met this woman two nights before and that she’d promised him that they could go away together...only he had to kill his wife and children first.
Here’s what eventually got him sent to the Atascadero State Hospital rather than being put on trial for first degree murder: when he was asked where he met this woman Brandy, he said she’d come out of the black box that was in his bedroom. He’d bought her at an establishment called Le Sexx Shoppe in Old Town Pasadena.
The funny thing was we found no black box in his bedroom, or anywhere on the property.
Mr. Haynes insisted on this story, though, and didn’t deviate from it under intense questioning. In fact, the psychiatrists we brought in to question him and determine whether he was really delusional or merely faking it, reported unanimously that Martin Haynes bore all the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia and paranoid delusions. A conviction would be impossible.
That’s where we were by the time my retirement rolled around. In a way, I was glad to be rid of the case.
Of course, we checked Martin Haynes’s story completely, or at least the part of it that was rooted in reality. He had checked into a hotel on Foothill Boulevard in La Crescenta on a Friday evening in April. He was very much into sex dolls–you know, the blow-up dolls that are sold in porno shops and in the backs of magazines like Hustler and Swank. Martin had bought a new doll prior to showing up at the hotel, which he claimed was called “Dream Girl”, and according to him it was the most realistic sex doll he’d ever had. He claimed he inflated the doll up, and did whatever the hell guys like him do to sex dolls. The way Martin talked about this in his interrogations with the psychiatrists and I, you would think he was talking about having sex with a real woman because that’s what it had been like with him. Only after he fucked this doll, he claimed she became a real woman—a real flesh and blood woman—and that he and this woman had screwed like bunnies all weekend.
So of course I think the guy is making this up to cop an insanity plea. That’s the direction our questioning began to go towards: trying to get the subject to contradict himself or trip up. Nothing worked. Martin Haynes stuck with this story and didn’t deviate from it at all. It was actually creepy listening to him. The guy actually believed a blow-up doll had become a real-life human being, that it had become a woman with long black hair, dark eyes, with a perfect body and beautiful full breasts, that she was willing to do anything sexually with him. Well, no wonder why he called the doll a Dream Girl, right? The physical description of the woman was one of the first things we tried to go on as a way to dismantle his defense but that didn’t work. We had a sketch artist do a composite of her and put that over the wire. We never did locate her.
Once the psychiatrists began questioning him they agreed he wasn’t just making the stuff up. He really believed what he told us, and it was of their professional opinion that he was suffering from various delusions.
Much of the evidence supported this fact. The clerk at the adult video store didn’t remember Martin, but the store’s security video camera showed him making a purchase. In the video, Martin was observed purchasing something in a large black box. A search through the store’s records showed that the store had received a novelty called “Dream Girl” from a company called Eros, Ltd, based in a small town in Massachusetts. Inquiries to the company were in vain; the firm had dissolved shortly after they shipped the doll to Le Sexx Shoppe, and I was still trying to trace their shareholders and owners when my retirement came up.
Other aspects of the investigation went nowhere. I spoke to the desk clerk at the motel Martin checked into, several guests who’d stayed on the premises that weekend, as well as a waitress who served him and several patrons of the coffee shop he claimed he had breakfasted at one morning with Brandy. The witnesses unanimously agreed that Martin had been alone at the restaurant. In fact, the waitress related that he was carrying on a conversation with himself and acted like he was actually talking to somebody across the table from him.
So that’s where we were when my retirement came up. Open and shut, right? My superiors seemed to think so, as well as the DA. Martin Haynes was whisked quietly away to the Atascadero State Hospital.
But for some reason this case nagged at me.
It shouldn’t have. Martin’s kids related that their father was not a violent man, that he never would have done anything like this. Likewise, his colleagues at the HMO he worked at all had high praise for him and were shocked by the allegations. Everybody we talked to—family, friends, neighbors—unanimously agreed that even though some of them were aware of strain in the marriage, Martin was not a violent person and never would have harmed his wife. His children were shocked to learn from Martin’s confession that he had planned to kill them that afternoon after killing his wife.
On the week before I officially retired, I tapped into the VICAP network and submitted a query to find out if anything similar to the Martin case had happened elsewhere. The data I included in my query was too broad for the system, and as a result I got thousands of results. I asked an analyst at the office to comb through the spreadsheet I sent to him containing the information. “Humor me,” I said. “In your spare time see if you can find a pattern in these cases.” I gave him some rather general outlines of what I was looking for, gave him my home number, and then tried to forget about the case as I embarked on my retirement.
Howard called me at home five days later with the news that a man in Nebraska had killed his wife about two weeks after Martin Haynes killed his wife, Vicky.
He, too, claimed to have been ordered to kill his wife by his lover, a ravishing blonde woman he’d met that weekend.
A woman he claimed had transformed from a sex doll into a real-life woman.
That’s what grabbed my attention. That’s what started the obsession.
I contacted the Grand Island Police. The case was eerily similar. The perpetrator was a middle manager at a textile firm who was having marital problems. He claimed his wife no longer wanted to have sex with him, so he developed his fetish with sex dolls because he was afraid of the consequences that might befall him if he sought pleas
ure with prostitutes. He claimed that Cheryl (the blonde woman) had come out of the Dream Girl box he bought at a Grand Island Adult novelty shop, that he’d had the best sex with her he’d ever had, and that Cheryl told him she loved him, that she wanted to be with him forever and all he had to do for them to be together was for to kill his wife.
The police in Grand Island had made the same inquiries we did and gotten about as far. The establishment that sold Warren Douglas the box had no record of the transaction, and when I questioned them a few weeks later they claimed they’d never heard of an outfit called Eros, Ltd. The perpetrator in this case was also judged a paranoid schizophrenic by the psychiatrists who examined him.
Even though I was retired, I couldn’t help feeling obsessed by both cases. It drove Gloria a little nuts; we’d planned our retirements to coincide with each other and do nothing but relax and travel the country. But with this newfound information, I began to devote much of my free time to chasing down leads and investigate them more fully, even though both cases were officially closed. I stopped when I ran into the same dead end with the Nebraska case.
For the next two years I kept in touch with my old colleagues at the station, and whenever I had a moment I would do some research on my own. Gloria and I bought a Winnebago, and every few months we would take off on a jaunt. Sometimes we would board a plane and visit other parts of the country. When we were at home we found plenty to do; gardening, home improvements, catching up on our reading, taking long walks around the neighborhood. We spent every evening making love, and our physical relationship was rekindled to the heat it had when we first met in 1961, when she was a young college girl. She was beautiful, and had blossomed into a mature beauty that was natural and radiant. I didn’t lie when I said earlier that I never desired another woman throughout our marriage. Gloria remained beautiful and desirable to me from the moment I laid eyes on her. When we made love it was like joining with her in the flesh for the first time. When her heat enclosed me I could never contain myself, and she would urge me on in a voice that drove me wild. And when I released myself it was like being young again. Gloria satisfied me in so many ways, and she continued to do so even in our retirement. Our appetite for sex had never waned; in fact, it seemed to grow stronger.