Dark Side Darker

by Lucas T. Harmond

  There didn’t appear to be anyone inside, but a large breakfast bar at the centre of the room was obscuring most of his view. Reluctantly he made his way around it, avoiding the debris on the floor and keeping himself as far away from the unit as he could. There was nothing on the other side except more broken crockery. “Jesus, what happened here?” There was a loud bump in the hall and he span the beam around. It landed on nothing. There was another thud from above and the whole house seemed to groan, a few more plates slipped from a shelf and smashed onto the floor, making him almost scream.

  McCalister’s heart was racing and he was about an inch from falling into complete panic. In all his years as a police officer, he’d never seen anything like this.

  The strange smell seemed to be increasing, and again he found it almost overpowering. McCalister returned to the hallway making a quick check of the rooms. The living room seemed almost undisturbed, except for the large television set which had been left on with its channel set to static. It hissed and buzzed alone in the dark. There was a collection of open CD cases, reefer skins and rolling mats on the table, a few tabs of acid, pills and a half-drank bottle of red wine. The living room ran back into a conservatory, covered in rugs and pillows. A battered looking sitar sat propped in one corner next to a gigantic bong.A few candles still burned on their shelves here and there. The table in the dining room had been turned over but nothing else seemed wrong; the other room, which held a pool table, also seemed untouched.

  McCalister was left staring up the darkened stairs with a growing sense of dread. He thought he heard some faint whisper from above and he stood listening intently in the dark. Without a doubt, there was a muffled sound coming from up stairs.Lightning cast a moment of daylight brightness throughout the house and he half expected the girl’s body to jump up at him. As the steady roar of thunder exploded across the stormy sky, he again forced himself to remain calm.

  He was shaking. “Come on man, keep it together, the dead can’t touch you. Come on McCalister, get up those stairs.”

  As he put a foot on the first step, the antique stairs creaked menacingly. “Come on McCalister, up those fuckin’ stairs!” With that he began to ascend. The headless corpse waited for him halfway. He didn’t really want to reach it, let alone pass it. And then he found himself coming to a halt as he reached it, noticing similar cuts as the girl on the floor over the headless corpse’s back.

  This time when the lightning flashed he nearly fell down the stairs.

  “Jesus! Give me a break!” he cursed.

  He was breathing erratically as he again began to climb.The stairs turned onto a small landing before continuing up. A vase of roses and the stand it had stood on had been thrown down there.

  The wooden banisters above him were warped in a way which made no sense. The ornate oak poles had snaked and twisted as if they’d melted. McCalister was fast coming to the end of his nerves. He knew whatever had happened here was way out of his experiences.

  Maybe anybody’s. The picture frames along the hall had jumped to smash on the wooden floor. The wall itself seemed to be at the wrong angle, leaning outward. It was an old house, but even so...

  McCalister had been steadily talking to himself to control his growing terror for some time, and now was no different.

  “I don’t know about this, I just don’t know about this...” he kept quietly whispering to himself as he made his way along the landing. If a door was shut he made no attempt to explore it, and all the while the sickly, sweet musk was growing stronger. He was getting closer to something.

  He knew by now he should have reported back, but some strange compulsion was driving him on. The more crazy it got the more he had to know. Besides, how could he explain this?

  In an opened bathroom at the end of the hall he found another body. A large, dark haired girl was partly dressed and crouched up, as if in fear, in a corner between the toilet and the wall. There was a strong stench of urine coming from inside. She was staring with wide, dead eyes which held a glassy terror. At first he couldn’t see any signs of damage and he briefly considered that she might still be alive, but then his torch picked up the thick pool of blood she sat it, creeping from some unseen wound.

  “What the fuck is going on here?”

  He backed away treading on broken glass, panicking at the crunch and spinning the beam in a wide ark. A door he’d passed slowly creaked open as if by its own will. He waited but nothing came out; yet, it was in there that the full extent of how fucked up things truly were was revealed to him. A naked pair of legs were dangling from the ceiling.

  The ceiling had warped, drooping downwards, and at the centre a girl’s lower half had slipped through. The legs hung there and the effect was as if a stone had been dropped in a plaster lake and then frozen. McCalister had pressed himself up against the wall, his beam locked on the impossible vision above him. His mind was reeling, refusing to accept what he was seeing. He was gibbering in quiet terror to himself, with no idea of what he was saying.

  Something stirred beside him and he darted the torch around. A ragged looking teddy bear fell from the windowsill it had been resting on. There was a crash from the attic above. An unearthly groan shifted through the house and he heard things falling to the floor throughout the house. The dead legs swayed slightly as the house settled, and he couldn’t tear his eyes from them.

  McCalister quickly re-discovered his Roman Catholic faith and made the sign of the cross over his pounding heart. What he was seeing now seemed to confirm so much of what he had long ago dismissed. Only it was clearly the other side of his belief that was being revealed to him.

  “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, this is fucked, this is so far past fucked—Jesus...,” he was babbling to himself in unending hysteria.

  Despite the fact that every sense he had left was screaming at him not to, he knew he had to go into the attic. If there were answers, if there could be, they were there.

  He began to slow his breathing, his resilient mind getting a grip of the situation, pushing through the maddening un-realness of it and realising, despite everything, he ‘was’ seeing ‘exactly’ what he ‘was seeing’!

  For some reason he found himself partly remembering a quote from the Sherlock Holmes stories he’d loved so much as a child:

  “When you’ve removed the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable must in fact be truth.” He laughed a little too wildly and shook his head, still staring at those legs—those fucking legs!

  “Get a grip McCalister, get a fuckin’ grip man!” His words didn’t help much but they did give a sense of reality to what in fact—

  Those fucking legs in the ceiling—those...

  He had to snap out of it. Had to get the hell out of that room. “Get goin’ McCalister, just start walking!” Somehow he was moving, forcing himself not to look back at that nightmare vision.

  He stood outside in the hall, breathing erratically, back against the wall, massaging the side of his temples. He’d broke out into a cold sweat and—Jesus how could that have been real? He resisted the compulsion to look back into the room. He knew exactly what he would see. McCalister was pinned there by fear. He wanted to get the hell out of the house, but he could no longer face the bodies that waited by the door. He was pointing the flashlight at every single creak and groan. It settled briefly on those unseeing eyes of the dead girl in the bathroom. “Oh god,” he murmured, closing his eyes, only to find that in the darkness he couldn’t escape anything.

  And slowly he again became aware of a muffled sound above. A distant screaming. Slowly he realised it was music. It was coming from the spiraling, black-painted, cast iron staircase at the opposite end of the hallway.

  Without thinking, he was moving towards it, driven on by that grim compulsion—he had to know what was on the other side of that ceiling, would never sleep again if he didn’t.

  He was cautiously heading up into the heavy, mind altering musk, heart pounding, breathing slowly and with
his head swimming. He nearly collapsed, couldn’t make it, and then suddenly he was at the top. It led to a tiny landing with a low ceiling, with one door to his back and one directly ahead. It was this one that was open.

  Some kind of heavy metal music was playing. The CD had glitched and the same few seconds of screaming and fuzzed-up guitar were jumping and constantly playing in an erratic loop. It was dark inside and all he could see was a collection of strange shapes silhouetted by what little light was coming in from the small window. Something was glowing in the dark—he paused at first, suspicious, until he realised it was only the LEDs of the music system. Slowly, forcing himself all the way, he raised the beam. The world fell away. Nothing could have ever prepared him for what he was seeing. His heart was in his mouth and terror like he’d never known swept through his body making him slowly back away. Every shaking stroke of the beam fell on some abomination that could never be explained.

  It was an orgy of melded flesh spread across the entire room.

  An attractive girl lay fused at its centre. Her mouth had opened up into some kind of scream, that somehow, impossibly, had moved down her whole body. That unending, dark void that sat in her like a hole in reality, a gaping abyss that ran between her small ivory breasts and ended at where her vagina would have been, would have been because most of the lower half of her body had slipped through the floor—just dissolved into the floor as if it was liquid. Some kind of male form was draped over her, in many places the limbs no longer distinguishable, one arm twisting down into the wall of that hole that had opened in her. Her arm ran into another body, was part of it and this body lay with most of its innards spilt on to the floor with its mangled legs stretched behind it. McCalister was lost in each hellish detail. A human head screamed at him from the chair it had been left sitting on. Used condoms and beer cans lay scattered amongst the rippling wood and flesh.

  McCalister was crying, slumping to the floor with his back pressed against the other door, unable to control the tears, now completely locked up by terror and unable to look away.Bodies were everywhere, slumped, entwined, as if the union of their lovemaking had become all-encompassing. Nondescript, sexless forms, the occasional opening of a wailing mouth, a clawing mutated hand—One man was leaning out from a wall, only his upper torso escaping from being engulfed, mouth locked open in a hideous yell, eyes screaming and reaching out in desperation for a hand he’d never touched.

  Every angle of the room was warped, falling in on itself, holes discharging something like mucus existed where they couldn’t. And it was all drifting, moving, flowing into itself and spreading out.

  It was a vision no psyche could withstand and it wouldn’t fade.

  Would never fade.

  JOSH

  HE WAS SOMEWHERE, ‘lost,’ in the middle of a dark cavern. The walls which crawled out of the darkness were bathed with white light from a source which wasn’t apparent. They were uneven brick, slick with putrid damp. In places they were patched with mud brown or lime green, like the remainders of stains, mostly scrubbed away.

  The figure at the centre was uncertain. Half-drowned in shadow, with their blood mottled wrists bound out to a rough hewn crucifix by slicing cords of barbed wire. Dark blood had congealed in layer after layer, broken through pallid flesh and separated by the glint of metal.

  Each part of the man’s naked body which was revealed by a spear of light showed to be blood splattered, bruised or cut. What showed most clearly was his face, frozen, mouth open in a scream of perpetual agony and with black holes where his eyes had been, had been since they had been gouged out. Now they were just dark hollows out of which waterfalls of crimson spilled down on to his ivory cheeks.

  Josh stood in front of it all, feeling himself being drawn in. He felt both repulsed and enchanted by what he saw, feeling for a change like he had ‘almost’ achieved what he had intended to. He pushed some more paint onto his brush and began to work into an area of the brick work which he wasn’t happy with. Again he admired the canvas.

  Sound was bouncing around the workshop’s cold walls. He tried to hear what song it was, but couldn’t tell. Way too muffled.

  Josh looked back to what had once been the garage’s office. It was a room built up in one corner with hardboard walls. A glass panel looked out to the workshop. The door fit badly, leaving a two inch gap beneath it, above which someone had written, “Beware of the midget limbo dancer” Good advice always.

  Through the window he could see Rufus, surrounded by the broken furniture that had at some point been piled up in there. He sat back in a one-armed swivel chair with his black, baggy combat trousered legs resting up on the woodworm eaten desk. Large brown shoulders escaped out the side of his sleeveless black T-shirt and thick black dreads fell half way down his back. His head subconsciously nodded to the music exploding out of the paint covered ghetto-blaster sitting on top of a pile of cushion-less chair frames. Most of his attention was taken up by the two page spread of glamour shots of Gail Porter in an almost worn away copy of some equally tattered magazine. The sketchbook he was supposed to be working on sat beneath his resting feet.

  Casually Josh glanced back to his painting. “Shit!” he hissed and franticly began to search for a cloth.

  A single river of red had run down the face of the figure and was mixing into the still-drying oil paint. There wasn’t a cloth so he began to dab at the spill with his brush. It stopped and he began to assess how much damage had been done. He found himself following up the smeared trail of red to its source, the mess where an eye should have been. Something was bothering him. He sniffed the paint scented air and noticed a sort of copper like smell. Thick and rich. He didn’t think much of it. It was barely present, just about noticeable. A streak of red shot out of the other eye crater, only too quickly. It darted like mercury down into an area of shadow and disappeared.

  “What the fuck?” Josh said in a whisper and blinked. Then the painting was normal again. Just the vague trace of the original run-off remained. He just stared for a second, stunned and with a hint of fear beginning to grow in him. The paint had seemed not to run down the canvas but instead had seemed to pour down the face. It had followed the contours of the skull beneath, ran down the neck, and when it had reached shadow, had actually seemed to flow beneath.

  Josh froze, trying to understand exactly what he had just seen, but couldn’t. So he just stood static with a deeply troubled expression welded onto his face and then a heavy hand fell onto his shoulder. He jumped inwardly and looked round.

  “Yo, chill man.” Rufus said with a wide grin.

  Josh didn’t reply just looked back at the picture. It was as it had been.

  “Hey are you all right?”

  Josh was struggling to change a gear in his mind. Logic told him not to act weirded out.

  “Yeah... erm, just... didn’t hear you. Yeah didn’t hear you.” The hesitancy in his voice was ill hidden.

  “Yeah? Looked like you was really into it.”

  “What!?” He replied too sharply.

  “Your painting? The canvas you’re painting!” Rufus chided. Whatever he was thinking stayed pretty much hidden behind the wide insect-eyed sunglasses that curved round the shape of his head.

  Josh laughed nervously. “Yeah, I was... I was, urm, you know, like really, really concentrating.”

  “You’re acting fucking weird man, even for you. Sure you’re alright?” He paused and smiled before adding light heartedly. “Your mind’s finally warped hasn’t it? Either way, I’ve got to go attend to some business, so I’ll see you later, right?”

  Josh knew what that business would be. Normally he’d rip the piss with mock disgust, but not now. He was too distracted, couldn’t concentrate, so only looked back at his work. The canvas looked the same. Slightly reassured he turned back to Rufus.

  “Later?” He said distantly and again glanced at the painting.

  “Yeah, at the Factory! Jesus, you know that club we go to every Friday? Maybe you rem
ember?”

  Josh nodded and forced a smile. “Oh that place. Well yeah, see ya’... see ya’ there.”

  Rufus’s lips formed an amused smile and he shook his head slowly. “Rriiiight. Later man!” With that he slung on his ankle length black leather and moved towards the door.

  He paused there and turned. “Yo’ give the work a rest man, I think the fumes are doing stuff to ya’ brain. Later puta!”

  The heavy wooden door rattled shut behind him.

  Josh suddenly felt very alone. He found himself staring at the now-closed door, not really wanting to turn round; he felt sure the picture would be different again. Slowly he began to turn, forcing himself. The canvas was normal, or at least more normal. Slowly Josh shook his head and found himself looking at opened paint tubes. Did oil paints give off fumes strong enough to do—that? He desperately wanted to put it down to his imagination but in truth he knew the vision had been too vivid. Way too vivid.

  “This is crazy.” He mumbled, and wondered if he was too. “Shit.” He said in a whisper and held his eyes closed. How long had it been? Three, no—four years, back when he’d just turned eighteen, just started the Art Foundation.

  Again he looked at the painting still expecting the worst to happen. It didn’t.

  “Urm, moody!”

  “Fuck!” He hissed, hand clasping his heart and jolting round to see who stood behind him now.

  Josh’s panic was met with sweet laughter, a voice he recognised maybe better than his own.

  “Jesus Christ, Sarah, don’t do that!”

  She smiled and he got lost in her face briefly. Her ice pale blue eyes, milk pale skin, cute nose, a beautifully formed pink little mouth, her long dark chestnut hair tinged with red. For a second he forgot about the vision, then he struggled against the new one to get back to reality. Some kind of reality.