Dark Room

by Tom Becker

  “You awake, darlin’?”

  Darlin’ Darla. Hopper’s little girl. Darla didn’t move.

  “It’s time to go, darlin’,” Hopper whispered, his breath stale with sleep and liquor. “You need to grab your things.”

  Wordlessly Darla rolled out of bed, slid on a pair of jeans and slipped her feet into a pair of old trainers. Reaching under the bed, she pulled out a sports bag crammed with her things. Everything she owned in the world, her whole life, could be squeezed into a single bag. It was always packed – years of living with her father had taught Darla to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

  A chink of light appeared in the darkness: Hopper opened the fridge and grabbed a fresh beer bottle. He twisted off the cap and took a swig, glancing at Darla to check she was ready before unlocking the trailer door.

  The rain was coming down in hard, straight lines, splattering the muddy ground between the rows of trailers. A fat man in khaki fatigues and a cap was hunched in the rain, his gut lurching over his belt.

  “’Bout time,” he growled. “I’m gettin’ soaked out here.”

  Hopper sighed. “I was sleeping, Marvin. What do you want?”

  “My grampa told me about the money you talked outta him. I’m here to take it back.”

  “Take it back?” Hopper’s tone was one of smooth surprise. When it came to talking his way out of things, he’d had a lot of practice. “Why would he want to do that? I told your grampa he’d see a handsome return on his investment. But these things take time, Marvin!”

  “Don’t care about fancy talk,” Marvin said obstinately. “I just want the money.”

  “I don’t have it!” laughed Hopper. “It’s tied up in stocks and shares. How else do you think we were going to make a profit? Now, if your grampa can just wait a few days—”

  Marvin lifted up his khaki jacket, revealing a pistol tucked into his belt.

  “You’re gonna give me that money,” he said darkly, “or we gonna have ourselves a serious problem.”

  Darla shrank back into the shadows.

  “Whoa there!” Hopper said quickly, holding up his hands. “OK, OK, I’ll get your money.” He took another swig from his beer bottle. “Why don’t you come in out of the rain and we’ll sort it out, hey? Want a drink?”

  Marvin shrugged. “OK.”

  Hopper grinned, and threw his beer in the man’s face. As Marvin spluttered and staggered backwards, Hopper dropped his shoulder and charged into him, knocking him to the ground.

  “Run, Darla!” he cried.

  She did as she was told, her feet splashing through muddy pools as she sprinted up the narrow cut between their trailer and its neighbour. Hopper headed straight on, arms pumping as he hared through the darkness. Suddenly the night was alive with angry shouts, barking dogs and blaring TV sets. At the end of the cut Darla darted left, making for the entrance to the park. From somewhere among the trailers she heard the sharp crack of a pistol shot. Terrified, Darla looked behind her, only to slip on the soggy ground and fall face-first in the mud. A Doberman on a rusted chain snarled and lunged at her, jaws snapping in the air. But Darla was already scrambling to her feet, picking up her sports bag and racing away.

  When she reached the entrance to the trailer park, Darla spotted Hopper climbing into the front seat of their battered Buick. He always left the car in the same spot, no matter how much he had drunk. They had a habit of leaving town in a hurry, usually with someone hot on their heels.

  Darla ran over to the car and almost fell into the passenger seat, slamming the door shut behind her.

  “You OK, honey?” asked Hopper.

  Darla didn’t have the breath to reply. She nodded.

  Hopper turned on the engine and flicked on the headlights, trapping Marvin in the glare as he came charging through the rain. The fat man’s cap had fallen off and his face was bright red with fury. As Hopper hastily threw the Buick into reverse, Marvin took aim with his pistol. Darla cried out, ducking down and throwing her hands over her head. There was a loud bang as the car hastily backed away from the trailer park, a bullet winging the bodywork. The Buick swung round with a screech of tyres and flew away down the road. Marvin’s threats echoed in the night, his bulky silhouette melting into the darkness.

  “Well now,” chuckled Hopper. “That was pretty damn close!”

  Darla stared at him coldly. Hopper’s smile faded. As the Buick rattled down a deserted country road he shook his head and slapped his face a couple of times, trying to sober up. He turned on the radio, hopping from station to station in search of his favourite country music songs. Darla’s panicky breaths began to slow, and her heart stopped pounding against her ribcage. She had seen it all before. Another midnight flight, another strange town in the morning. It was barely worth learning each new place’s name.

  They drove for hours without encountering a single car, just the Buick and an endless stretch of road. Eventually the needle on the fuel gauge dropped dangerously low, and Hopper was forced to pull over at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. A revolving sign rattled in the wind on the edge of the empty forecourt. Through the window of the gas station, Darla saw an old man dozing behind the counter. Hopper gave her a nudge, pointing at the restroom sign over the right-hand side of the building.

  “How about you go freshen up while I fill the tank?”

  Darla shook her head. “I’m OK.”

  “You’re covered in mud!” exclaimed Hopper. “What do you think people are gonna say if they see you walking around looking like the Swamp Thing? You want a state trooper thinking I’m neglecting you, asking us all kinds of questions? Go on now, darlin’, clean yourself up.”

  Darla stared at Hopper. Even with tousled hair and beer breath he was still a good-looking man, although she knew it wouldn’t be long before the drink took his looks the way it had taken everything else. She wanted to hate him so much. But the truth was her hopeless, drunken daddy was all she had in the world. Without Hopper, she would be totally alone.

  Reluctantly Darla opened the car door and climbed out of the Buick. It was raining hard as she hurried over to the restroom, and she was relieved to find the door unlocked. Inside it was pitch black, the air sour with the stink of urine. After a few seconds scrabbling about on the wall, Darla’s fingers found the light switch. The strip light buzzed like an angry hornet above her head, casting a harsh light over the restroom. The floor was covered in paper towels and crude graffiti was scrawled over the walls and the cubicle door. A jagged crack ran the length of the mirror above the basin.

  “Great,” Darla muttered.

  She went over to the basin and turned on the faucet. It coughed painfully, spitting out a thin stream of water. Darla squeezed some liquid soap out of the dispenser and quickly washed the mud off her hands, aware that Hopper would give her hell if she kept him waiting too long. She splashed her face with warm water, the basin turning brown as mud gurgled down the plughole. Her clothes were damp but there was no way Darla was going to go back to the Buick to get changed. She didn’t want to spend a second longer in this place than she had to.

  As Darla stared at herself in the mirror, the strip light flickered and the walls of the restroom seemed to shiver. Suddenly Darla had the unsettling sensation of looking at the world through someone else’s eyes, of her chest rising and falling with ragged breaths that weren’t her own. The restroom had vanished; instead she was hunched over a desk inside a small, windowless room lit by a single red bulb that lent a bloody hue to the shadows. Photographs hung pegged from strings crisscrossing the room like cobweb strands, and floated inside processing trays arranged side-by-side on a long table.

  A pair of gloved hands reached out and opened a photograph album on the desk in front of her, turning it to a fresh page. As Darla looked at it through unfamiliar eyes she felt her breaths come faster – a combination of her own growing unease and another’s excitement. She glanced up again at the pegged photographs. They were all terrified faces – bulging
eyes and gaping mouths, hands flung up in front of the lens in futile defensive gestures.

  Darla screamed.

  The dark room and its photographs vanished, and her senses were her own again. Sick with dizziness, Darla had to clutch hold of the basin to keep herself from falling over. She turned and stumbled out of the restroom into the rain. Hopper had emerged from the gas station at the same time – at the sight of her pale face, he gave her a quizzical glance.

  “Everything all right, darlin’?”

  Darla took a deep, steadying breath and nodded. “I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They climbed back into the Buick and Hopper gunned the engine into life. The last sound Darla heard before the night swallowed them up was the restroom door, banging mockingly in the wind.

  Chapter Two

  Around dawn they pulled into the lot outside Harley’s Diner, a small, tired-looking building just off the highway. A bell tinkled above their heads as Hopper pushed through the door. The only other customer was sitting at the counter – a heavy-set trucker in a plaid shirt poring over a newspaper. A bored-looking waitress wearing bright red lipstick gazed at the television in the corner of the diner. Pans clattered loudly in the kitchen. The air was thick with the smell of grease and exhaust fumes.

  Hopper went straight to a booth by the window and ordered coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs over easy for Darla – she wasn’t hungry, but he hadn’t bothered asking. She had barely spoken two words since the gas station, still haunted by what had happened in the restroom. Darla wanted to dismiss it as nothing, a strange mental blip, but the dark room and its eerie photographs had felt so real. Even hours later, it was hard to shake the sensation of being in someone else’s skin. Hopper was too preoccupied to notice Darla’s silence, but even if he had she wouldn’t have told him what had happened. Darla had learned to keep her problems to herself.

  The young waitress appeared with their order, smiling at Hopper as she put down the plate in front of Darla. Hopper murmured a thank you and flashed the waitress a grin. Darla stared down at her food. The eggs were grey and filmy, the bacon almost burnt. She pushed the plate away and poured sugar into her coffee, cradling her hands around the warm mug.

  “Food’s getting cold,” said Hopper, nodding at her plate.

  “I don’t want anything,” Darla said.

  “You got to eat, darlin’.”

  “You ain’t eating.”

  “I ain’t hungry.”

  “Neither am I!”

  “Dammit, Darla!”

  As Hopper stared at her, exasperated, Darla picked up a piece of bacon, snapped it in two and shoved a piece in her mouth.

  “There,” she said. “Happy now?”

  “Ecstatic, darlin’,” Hopper replied dryly. “Fit to burst.”

  He took another sip of coffee, and went back to staring out of the window. In a dark bar Hopper could easily pass for late twenties, but the drab dawn light seemed to linger on the grey flecks in his hair and the lines around his eyes. Darla hated it when he tried to act like a concerned father. If Hopper really cared about her he’d quit drinking and get a proper job. Maybe then they wouldn’t end up being chased around trailer parks by angry men with guns.

  Hopper’s expression softened, sensing Darla’s mood.

  “Look,” he said, taking hold of her hand. “I know you’re angry about what happened back there. At the trailer park, I mean. And I’m sorry about that. Obviously there was a misunderstanding with Marvin’s granddaddy and—”

  “A misunderstanding?” Darla laughed incredulously. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”

  “Don’t start on me, Darla,” Hopper said irritably. “Not now.”

  Truth was, Darla wasn’t sure what to call what Hopper did. There weren’t many jobs he hadn’t tried his hand at – carpenter and crayfisherman, ranch hand and salesman, even (briefly) a private detective. When he was younger he’d played guitar in country bands around the South, with a couple of famous names, too, if you believed him. But he never lasted long at anything, even when Darla’s mom Sidney had still been alive. He’d get too hungover and miss his shifts, or worse he’d turn up drunk. After Sidney’s death the drinking had got even worse, and the jobs dried up completely. Hopper became evasive when Darla asked where the money was coming from. But she knew the answer without him saying a word: conning and shamming, grafting and hawking, selling and stealing – anything for a dollar.

  “Taking money from Marvin is one thing,” said Darla, “but his granddaddy? You’re stealing from an old man!”

  “Keep your voice down,” Hopper said quickly. “I wasn’t stealing, never did anything of the sort. I offered him an investment opportunity and he took it. There weren’t any guarantees.”

  “Of course there weren’t! The only one who ever makes any money from your schemes is you!”

  “They don’t know that! For a few dollars, a pocketful of change, ordinary people – people like you and me and Marvin’s granddaddy, who ain’t never had a break and ain’t never going to get one – can think that it’s their turn to get lucky, that they’re going to be rich. I’m selling dreams, Darla. Ain’t no one can put a price on that, on hope.”

  Hopper leaned forwards as he spoke, his voice low, his eyes wide with sincerity. He could have been a preacher, Darla thought sourly.

  “Nice speech,” she said. “But I heard it already, and I ain’t got no money to give you.”

  Defeated, Hopper let go of her hand. He slid her plate in front of him and began to eat the bacon and eggs – not because he was hungry, Darla knew, but because he’d paid for the food and wasn’t about to let it go to waste. When the trucker got up from his stool and waddled out of the diner, Hopper retrieved his discarded newspaper. At the sight of the name above the headline, the Saffron Hills Bugle, he started.

  “What is it?” asked Darla.

  For a time Hopper said nothing. “That’s the problem with driving blind,” he said softly. “There’s no telling where you might end up.”

  “What’s wrong with Saffron Hills?” Darla let out a groan. “Don’t tell me – you had one of your misunderstandings, and you’re not welcome here no more either.”

  Hopper shook his head. “It ain’t that,” he said. “I haven’t been in these parts for a very long time, believe me. Never thought I’d return, either.”

  As far back as she could remember, Darla had been on the move, following her parents on a restless, meandering path across the southern states of America – from Arizona and New Mexico to Louisiana and Georgia, and now South Carolina. In all that time, she had never seen her daddy react this way. She was curious why, but she knew there was no point in asking him. Instead she watched Hopper flick through the small ads, his brow creased in concentration.

  Turning the page, he let out a soft whistle. “Would you look at that?”

  Peering over his arm, Darla saw a large advert for a man calling himself the ‘Realtor King of Saffron Hills’. His name was Luis Gonzalez – a short, bald man with a dazzling smile. He was standing on the front lawn of a beautiful white mansion, his arms spread wide in a welcoming gesture.

  “Who’s that?” asked Darla.

  “An old friend,” Hopper replied. “Looks like someone’s gone up in the world.”

  He didn’t say any more, which was fine by Darla. She wasn’t in the mood for any more mysteries that morning. Finishing her coffee, she got up to use the restroom, her pulse quickening as she pushed open the door. But it was just a normal restroom – there were no flickering lights or shivering walls, or eerie visions hiding in the mirror for her. She came back into the diner to find Hopper settling up the check, the waitress leaning against the booth by his shoulder.

  “You passing through or sticking around?” she asked him.

  “That depends,” drawled Hopper. “All the girls round here as pretty as you?”

  The waitress giggled, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear. She shook her head
.

  “Nope, I wouldn’t think so,” said Hopper. “Word woulda gotten around.”

  Darla marched up to the booth, pushing past the waitress and standing directly in-between the two of them.

  “Ready, Daddy?”

  “Of course, darlin’,” said Hopper. He got to his feet. “You have a good day, now,” he told the waitress.

  “You too,” she smiled.

  Darla stalked out of the diner, not looking behind her to see whether Hopper had followed. The rain had stopped but the ground was still strewn with puddles, the air warm and thick as syrup.

  “Hey, wait up!”

  Hopper jogged after Darla, the newspaper folded up under his arm. “You taking up track this year?” he laughed. “I’m struggling to keep up here!”

  Darla whirled round. “You are unbelievable!” she said through clenched teeth.

  Hopper blinked. “What did I do?”

  “Back there, with that giggling Barbie doll – I leave you for thirty seconds and you’re hitting on the waitress!”

  Hopper looked wounded. “It wasn’t nothin’ like that, Darla. I was only being sociable. Everyone likes a compliment.”

  The most irritating thing was, Darla believed him. Hopper didn’t mean to sweet-talk that waitress, just like he never meant to upset Darla or put her in danger. But that was what he did, all of the time. Grudgingly she let him open the passenger door of the Buick for her, and climbed inside. Hopper tossed the newspaper on to the backseat and started up the engine.

  “So what now?” asked Darla.

  “We go and pay the Realtor King a visit,” Hopper replied, guiding the Buick back out on to the highway before making a right at the next intersection. “Marnie said Saffron Hills isn’t ten minutes along this here way.”