When the Darkness Falls

by Gonzalez, J. F.

  A moment later the flames were blazing, warming the family room. Richard turned around—

  Carrie was gone.

  Richard went to the coffee table where his own cup of joe was and he sipped it. He heard Carrie rummaging around in the garage, probably taking out the garbage. Then he heard her walk through the kitchen to the entry hall and up the stairs. He noticed that it had stopped snowing and his mind wandered, resting briefly on the dream Carrie had: the madman stalking her with the axe–him!—bearing a crazed expression, running into the house and waking up. Telling his dream-self about the nightmare she’d just had, then turning around to see that Richard had become that same crazed madman holding that axe, leering at her with a look of insanity.

  Then the local legends of all those people who’d stayed in Silver Spring when the weather became like this...and the madness that took over them, bringing the male members to insanity and murder. How they’d slaughtered their families with hatchets.

  And all because the vengeful spirit of a slain man couldn’t rest. And was reawakened when weather conditions reached the same as the day he was lynched.

  It suddenly hit Richard; Carrie’s dream, what he represented in the dream, the legends.

  Christ, no wonder she was looking at me like that! She’s terrified out of her mind.

  He heard a noise behind him and felt her presence before he turned around—he’d heard her rummage around upstairs in both the kids’ bedrooms as they slept before she’d headed back downstairs. She was standing there, madness in her eyes, her features a contorted rictus of lunacy. The axe she held in her hands was the one he’d used to split kindling during the winter months in Maine. The blade was stained with fresh blood, as were her face and the front of her shirt. She hefted it in her hands, the blade gleaming sharply. “I’m not going to let you do it to me,” she said, drool running down her chin as she advanced on him and lifted the blade over her head to take the first swing. “I’m not going to let you...”

  FROM THE LANCASTER INTELLIGENCER

  January 27, 2002

  Three family members were murdered yesterday in what police described as a bloodbath.

  Police say Carrie Sweigart used an axe to brutally murder her two young children and her husband in a frenzy that this area hadn’t seen in fifty years. Their bodies were found when their neighbors, Paul and Susan Ross, returned home from a weekend trip and dropped by for a visit. “I never thought something like this could happen here,” Paul Ross related. “They were such lovely people.”

  The suspect isn’t speaking and is under suicide watch at the Lancaster County Prison for women, where she is also under a psychiatric evaluation. A neighbor, who witnessed the police leading Ms. Sweigart out in handcuffs, related that she looked insane. “She kept saying being cooped up during the blizzard was influencing the spirit, whatever that was,” says Alvin Moore. “She kept saying they were stuck there for five days, that the storm wouldn’t let them out.” Other witnesses reported that Ms. Sweigart said the same thing.

  With Lancaster County experiencing the mildest winter on record in over twenty years—only six inches of snow has been recorded this season—it’s obvious that other factors, perhaps mental instability, was the cause for the brutal murders. Grieving family members confirmed that Carrie Sweigert met her husband, Richard, when both were being treated for various mental disorders at a state-run psychiatric facility and that they married soon after they were released (continued on Page 4).

  Dedicated to the memory of Javier “Eddie” Reza

  The Watcher From the Grave

  I

  Now about the “terrible and forbidden books”—I am forced to say that most of them are purely legendary. There never was any Abdul Alhazred or Necronomicon, for I invented these names myself.—H. P. Lovecraft, Letter to Willis Conover, dated July 29, 1936.

  Justin Grave was lucky that the house he finally landed had such a cheap rental rate.

  It was situated at the end of a long, narrow road in Reamstown, Pennsylvania, a lonely two story rambling farmhouse situated on ten acres of land. His closest neighbor was half a mile up the road. He could work well into the night with the phonograph playing loud and it wouldn’t pose a problem.

  The rental agent had informed him that the previous occupant of the house had kept late hours, too, and that most of the neighbors had hardly known he was around. She seemed to think he was a student, pre-med maybe, who was on a brief sabbatical from University. In either case, acquiring the house took a load off of Justin’s mind. The rent was affordable, the location bearable, and the space gigantic compared to his apartment in town. He already decided where the study and the library were going to be. All he had to do was settle in.

  He moved in right after Christmas. The holidays were bitter cold, and on New Years Eve greater Lancaster County, Pennsylvania received a foot of snow that covered everything from barns to downtown city streets. Justin moved in three days before the storm.

  The storm lasted four days, unleashing a cold front brought along by a fierce wind that blew in from Canada. It was a good thing he’d moved in and unpacked before it hit. What better place to be in a howling storm than snug in your own warm study with the fireplace blazing?

  The storm brought no relief. Justin sat by the radio on the second day of the storm, listening to a weather broadcast. The forecasters were predicting a Nor’easter to pummel much of the New England and Mid-Atlantic region. Bad weather. The rest of the month was going to be shot as far as neighborhood exploration went.

  This became apparent two weeks later. He’d just finished another Rex Bates tale for Adventure Magazine when he suddenly realized it had been six months since he’d worked on anything horrific. His last appearance in the land of the weird had been “...When the Bells Toll” which appeared in the December issue of Weird Tales. That story had been written at the commencement of the previous summer. The six-month time lag had been spent writing two science-fiction novels to be serialized in Amazing Stories and Astounding respectively, along with the usual work. As a writer of pulp fiction, Justin Grave could turn out romance novellas for Romance Stories and Love Stories; detective stories for Black Mask and Detective Fiction, adventure serials for Argosy, and weird-menace tales for Spicy Mystery Stories, Thrilling Mystery, Dime Mystery Magazine, Terror Tales, and Horror Stories. Thank God for pseudonyms.

  But the itch to churn out a couple of horror stories gnawed at him. His first sale had been to a small circulation pulp (a rag actually) entitled Tales of Terror, in the summer of 1928 when he’d graduated from high school. His first appearance in Weird Tales saw print six months later. In the ten years that followed he’d probably published well over five hundred stories and a few serialized novels in every pulp magazine on the stands. By the time he graduated to writing full time, his name was being advertised on the covers of the horror pulps along with H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, as well as in most of the adventure and detective fiction pulps. Even some of the pen names he used for the romance pulps began to make cover status after a few years. Half of the stuff he churned out was pulp for the masses, with a guaranteed life of one month on the racks in whatever pulp magazine it appeared in, only to be gone by the next month’s issue. Forever.

  At least it paid the bills.

  The storm outside was providing the perfect atmosphere to get back into the horror mode. The house in general seemed to emanate a sense of foreboding. He noticed it when he first settled in. It was as if the very air was weighted, leaden. The elements seemed to churn and change in different rooms. It was probably his imagination—his mind had been turning to horrific themes for story ideas—but he still couldn’t shake the feeling off. It felt the strongest in three rooms; the kitchen, the bathroom, and the master bedroom. It was worse in the master bedroom. He would lie in bed, eyes wide open, faint murmurings fluttering through his mind. The silence of the house seemed to whisper to him and he got up a few times to investigate, thinking he really was hear
ing something moving stealthily in the house. He never found anything.

  Which was why he wanted to start on another horror tale. Channel the nightmares out of his mind and put them on paper. That method had always worked before. It would work again.

  A couple of feeble attempts at starting a new tale were undertaken in negative results. Writer’s block had set in after six months away from the creepy crawlies that he normally enjoyed dealing with. After his fifth attempt, he tore the page out of the typewriter and tossed the crumpled ball into the wastebasket. The storm showed no sign of abating and cabin fever had set in, making an afternoon walk a no-go. He had to clean out his mind, carve out the clutter that was occupying his brainpan.

  He decided to explore the rest of the house. The attic and the basement hadn’t been explored yet, and now the urge to examine them blossomed. He left his work area and donned a jacket to make the trip downstairs.

  The rental agent had steered clear of the basement during his initial tour. She’d simply pointed to the door of the basement, which was set by the kitchen. The key was in place on top of the heater. He scooped it up and fumbled it into the lock. The lock turned with a creak of protest, and he eased the door open slowly. Light from the kitchen stabbed feebly down into a yawning pit of darkness. The steps descended for about three feet and were swallowed by blackness.

  And the dark, pulsing, foreboding feeling ebbed out from the basement, washing over him. Stronger than ever before.

  His heart thumped hard in his chest as he grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen counter and flicked it on. The beam stabbed into the darkness, making the downward trek less hazardous.

  He descended slowly, the ominous feeling growing heavier on his shoulders. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong with this house, with the basement. And despite that feeling, he denied that it had anything to do with the supernatural. He wrote about it, dealt with it in his fiction, but he never believed in it. He refused to believe in it now.

  He tried to deny that there was something wrong. But his heart told him otherwise.

  He explored the basement that afternoon with the nervousness and fear of a child in an amusement park house of horrors. The feeling dwindled as the beam from his light began flashing on normal looking objects, and it soon subsided. A stack of boxes in the corner yielded moldering, ancient Penny Dreadfuls and turn of the century pulps. Another crate revealed back issues of Harper’s and Blackwood’s Magazine, more gems.

  Justin spent that afternoon leafing through them, transferring them to a pile on the floor to be taken upstairs for cataloguing into his own collection. When he was finished, he cast the beam of light around the shabby basement. There were a few chairs, a makeshift table with a layer of dust on it, an ancient stone fireplace that sat cold and empty, and a door set against the far wall. It was locked.

  Justin trundled his catch of the day up the stairs to his library. He spent the rest of the evening sorting through the ancient pulps. He couldn’t help but think of the day his wanderings through the closets of the house the week before yielded a similar find. Beneath a pile of old blankets in his study closet was a box of vintage pulps; early copies of Weird Tales (some with his own published work!), Strange Tales, and others. There was Arthur Machen’s The House of Souls, Robert W. Chambers The King in Yellow, the infernal book of Magic and Supernatural The Golden Bough, and a book he had never heard of, From Beyond by James Smith Long. He flipped open the cover of the latter; a collection of short fiction by a forgotten writer.

  Stacked in a heap with the pulps and books were notebooks filled with spidery handwriting. Justin had dragged the stuff out and spent the afternoon sifting through it. Most of the notes were scholarly in nature, depicting thematic structure and symbolism of the fiction in Long’s book, but there was a good deal of personal criticism as well. One of the journal entries stated “...am getting closer to what they’re hinting at. Even the newer crop of writers like Lovecraft hint at the same thing, yet I’m not so sure. Either way, I know I must do more research before I am absolutely sure of my theory.” Other books found in the stack were volumes on psychology, astronomy, anthropology, philosophy, history, theology, the occult, and archeology. There weren’t enough hours in the day to sift through all of them, so Justin gave up after a few hours and called it a night.

  And now he’d found more of the former occupant’s belongings. And things were getting weirder by the minute. He didn’t know much of anything about the former occupant, just that he’d simply “disappeared” after not paying the rent for the last two months. The landlord came to collect the rent last month and found that he’d simply left, with no forewarning. The landlord cleared out the furniture and put the residence up for lease again.

  The following day brought no new lightning bolt revelations for story ideas, so he trumped down the stairs to investigate the basement further.

  He stood in the center of the room, trying to figure out what to hit next. A box of magazines sat by the far wall and he inspected them. He pulled the top magazine off the pile and flipped it open. His eyes widened in shock at the vile, perverted images. He’d seen pornography once on a trip to visit his agent in New York, and the graphic images had shocked him. They shocked him now, and he flung the periodical to the floor in disgust.

  He sifted through the rest of the magazines with bated breath. They were all of the same ilk; their sexual perversions spiked through his brain, creating images that were sickening and repulsive. He moved the stack to the center of the room, making a mental note to burn them in the fireplace that evening.

  Now his curiosity was more piqued than ever. He still couldn’t shake his mind of the images. What kind of person could keep such literature and photos in his home? It was obvious that whoever possessed them had enjoyed them by evidence of their condition, which showed a sign of careful handling. It was this which turned his attention to the locked door set against the far wall.

  He tried the knob again; it was locked firmly. He began hunting around the basement until he found a crowbar on top of a pile of tools and debris by the fireplace. He hefted the tool in his hand and inserted its slim end into the crack of the door. Heaving with all his strength, he began prying the door open with the strain and groan of splintering wood.

  When the lock snapped, the door flew open and banged against the wall. Justin stood panting in the cold basement, his nostrils suddenly tracking a damp smell that issued from the tiny room he had just unearthed. He stabbed the beam of his flashlight in the room, revealing a dusty piece of string that hung from the ceiling. A light fixture.

  He reached inside the room and clicked on the light.

  The room was bathed instantly in light and Justin blinked. Black spots danced in his vision and he blinked them away as his eyes adjusted. When he finally saw what was displayed against the far wall of the room he had to put his hand to his mouth to hold back the scream that threatened to issue forth. As it was, the shock of the gruesome sight pitched him on his butt while the back of his head thunked softly against the wall. The pain from the bump failed to supersede the shock of what he was seeing.

  What looked to be a makeshift altar stood at the far end of the little room. It was constructed of large blocks of stone, about six feet by three feet. Running along both sides were what appeared to be gutters with drains that fed into two funnels that dripped into two buckets. The smell that came from the room was one of death and blood. Heart thumping hard in his chest, Justin took a step closer and peered into the buckets. They were empty, but it was obvious what they had once contained judging by the dried crimson that stained their steel surface.

  Justin felt his gorge rise as he looked around the tiny room. Above the makeshift altar was a strange symbol, part pentagram, part some other hieroglyph that he didn’t recognize. It appeared to have been drawn in blood. Dusty black, white, and red candles sat at various positions around the altar, and on his right, sitting on a makeshift ledge, was what appeared to b
e a human skull. Heart beating harder now, Justin approached the loathsome object for a closer inspection. It was a skull! But it looked strangely...inhuman.

  He didn’t know how long he sat there staring numbly at the scene. But when he finally came to his senses he heard the dull chimes of the grandfather clock upstairs in the entry hall tolling six p.m. His eyes widened in surprise. Five hours had elapsed since he trekked downstairs to investigate the basement. He shook his head to clear the shock and cobwebs from his mind. Where had his mind gone in that time?

  As if in answer to his question a vision rose in his mind, as if he were remembering a dream. It was a vision of an endless plane, a wide gulf beyond time and space. He felt himself floating in this dream, drifting among various shaped objects and shadowy figures. He heard droning, monotone voices calling out and he closed his eyes and drifted through the flow. He drifted onward through the vast gulf of this curious dimension, and then before he knew it he was back in the little cellar room and the clock was tolling.

  His mind was racing with a million questions and thoughts. He looked at the blood-stained altar, dismissing the dream as mere fantasy brought on by exhaustion. The important thing was dealing with what he’d found in his basement. The blood-stained altar only meant one thing: a crime had once been committed at this house, maybe the very same crime that had led to the disappearance of the former tenant. He needed to find more evidence before he decided what to do next.

  It was obvious that Justin had stumbled upon an amazing discovery. He was standing in what was very likely a private ritual chamber. The vile pornographic literature in the box outside had probably been the former resident’s, as well as the books and magazines upstairs. The maroon stains on the makeshift altar, and in the buckets were now easily explainable, as were the strange symbols drawn on the walls. All of which explained the weird feeling he got when he first set foot inside.