Dark Room

by Tom Becker

  Darla froze, waiting to hear someone’s voice call out. But no sound disturbed the shadows. Lights went out all the time, she told herself, it didn’t have to mean that something was wrong. So why was her heart racing in her chest? Darla slipped into the adjoining alcove only to be confronted by the mirror Annie had shattered. Tiny fragments of her own face stared back at her.

  As Darla looked into the broken glass, she felt herself being swallowed up by a mind that wasn’t her own. She was transported from one darkened room to another, where a girl with bright blond hair and a white tank top was slumped lifelessly in a chair. Her head was bowed, hiding her face. She let out a groan of pain, and Darla looked down and saw a knife in her own hand, blood on its blade…

  A sudden sound wrenched her back to the present. Footsteps, soft as a breath. There was someone in the gallery with Darla. And they were trying very hard not to be heard. Had the person watching her in the mall followed her here? What did they want with her?

  “Annie,” Darla whispered to herself. “Where are you?”

  The footsteps were drawing nearer. Darla edged along the wall, drawing further back into the gallery. In the next alcove, the oversize doll’s house sat in the middle of the room. Darla crept over to it and opened up the front, pulling her knees up to her chest and squashing herself inside. In the darkness it would be almost impossible to see her without looking closely through one of the windows. It would have to be enough.

  Darla waited. Seconds stretched out into minutes. The gallery remained silent.

  And then she heard a floorboard creak.

  Peering out through the dollhouse window Darla could just make out a figure moving stealthily around the alcove, little more than a shadowy outline in the darkness. With careful, even steps they circled the dollhouse. A hunter’s stealthy tread. Darla couldn’t bear to look – she closed her eyes and silently mouthed the Lord’s Prayer to herself over and over.

  “OurFatherwhoartinHeavenhallowedbethyname…”

  The footsteps paused.

  “ThykingdomcomethywillbedoneonEarthasitisinHeaven …”

  Slow, shallow breaths.

  “Giveusthisdayourdailybread…”

  The intruder had to be standing inches away from her. Darla was a tight ball of terror.

  “Andforgiveusourtrespasses…”

  One footstep, and then another. Whoever it was, they were leaving the alcove. Had they seen her? The footsteps grew firmer even as they went away, before the bell above the gallery entrance rang out. Darla slumped her head against the side of the dollhouse.

  “Hello? Is anybody there?”

  Darla almost burst into tears at the sound of Annie’s voice. Suddenly the gallery was flooded with warm light, and she could hear footsteps. Pushing open the dollhouse, Darla unfolded her cramped limbs and walked stiffly out of the alcove. Annie was standing in the middle of the gallery, a paper bag in her hands.

  “Darla, honey?” she said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost! What’s wrong?”

  Darla’s story came out in a rush, a nonsensical garble of words in her ears. When she told Annie about hiding in the dollhouse, the artist’s eyes widened.

  “They didn’t hurt they, did you?”

  “They didn’t do anything, except kinda walk about. I don’t know, maybe they were trying to scare me.”

  “That sounds horrible, hon, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here. I was feeling kinda peckish and went out for a Danish – I was in such a hurry I didn’t think to lock the door. Art thieves don’t tend to be a problem in Saffron Hills.”

  Now that Annie was here, fear had eased its sweaty grip on Darla’s heart. Together they searched the gallery from top to bottom, but there was no sign of any intruder. As they peered into one empty alcove after another, Darla began to feel a little foolish. Maybe she had imagined it, maybe her visions were getting more intense. And what about the girl in the white tank top? Her blond hair made Darla wonder whether it had been Carmen, only this girl hadn’t had the Perfect’s long, tumbling tresses. How could Darla warn someone they were in danger when she didn’t know who they were?

  “Well,” said Annie, as they checked the final room, “whoever was here, they’re gone now. But I’m thinking maybe we should go down to the police station and make a statement.”

  Darla shook her head quickly. Turning out the lights and walking around was creepy but not exactly illegal. And Hopper was already unhappy at the way she had been drawing attention to them both – what would he say about Darla going to the police about this? No, keeping quiet was the best thing.

  “Are you sure, hon?” Annie said.

  She nodded – and to her relief, the artist didn’t try to change her mind. It was dark by the time Annie locked up the gallery and drove Darla back to the creek. When they pulled up outside her house, Darla paused as she unbuckled her seatbelt.

  “Promise not to tell Hopper about today? I don’t want him worrying.”

  Annie patted her hand. “You can trust me, honey.”

  Darla smiled gratefully and got out of the car. The lights were on in the front window of her house, strains of country music drifting out into the evening air. As Darla entered the hall, she heard Hopper’s laughter coming from the back room. It sounded like he had company. When Darla walked into the back room and saw who it was, she blinked with surprise.

  Sasha was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the carpet, vinyl records scattered around her: Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline – all of Hopper’s favourites. Her dark hair had been dyed a shocking shade of red, and she had deliberately smudged her thick mascara to make it look as though she had been crying. But at that moment she was laughing at Hopper, who was crooning along with the record.

  “Help, Darla!” wailed Sasha, her hands over her ears. “Make it stop!”

  “What are you doing here?” said Darla.

  Sasha held up a record – it was the Sleater-Kinney album Darla had picked up earlier. “I brought you a present,” she said. “I got so bored I closed the store and went home to change and dye my hair and now I am officially ready to have fun. Hopper kindly said I could wait here with him until you got back. But it turns out it was just an evil trap to force me to listen to country music.”

  Hopper. So now they were on first-name terms. Great.

  “You oughta be thanking me!” Hopper told Sasha indignantly. “I am introducing you to a whole new world here – a world of love and heartbreak and lap steel guitar. Forget about your hip-hop and your emo or whatever the hell it is you kids listen to these days. This right here is the real sound of the wrong side of the tracks.”

  “What, like Taylor Swift?” teased Sasha.

  Hopper winced. “Ouch.”

  Darla couldn’t believe it. Only a week ago Sasha had been insistent that her daddy was a sleaze, but after an hour of playing records together the two of them seemed to be as thick as thieves. She glared at Sasha but, as usual, her friend didn’t seem to notice as she bounded to her feet and wrapped her arm around Darla.

  “So now you’ve finally decided to turn up, do you want to come out with me?”

  “I don’t know, Sasha,” Darla said reluctantly. “It’s been kinda a long day…”

  “All the more reason to go and have some fun!” Sasha replied brightly.

  “I was gonna stay in…”

  “Aw c’mon now, darlin’,” Hopper said encouragingly. “Your friend’s come all the way here to see you, and you’re going to turn her down?”

  She couldn’t believe her daddy was taking Sasha’s side. Maybe if he had heard himself being called a sleaze he’d think differently, Darla thought to herself. After what had happened in the gallery the last thing she wanted was to go out with Sasha, but with a sinking heart Darla realized that she wasn’t going to be able to resist her friend. When had she been able?

  “OK,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  Sasha clapped her hands together with glee.

  “And you’re sure you girls w
ill be safe, now?” said Hopper. “I know that Leeroy’s behind bars, but the curfew’s still in force.”

  “Scout’s honour,” Sasha replied dutifully. “We’re going over to Frank’s place to watch movies. He’ll drive us there and back.”

  “Then you have my paternal blessing,” Hopper told Darla. “Go and have fun, and leave this old man alone with his records.”

  She felt like screaming at the pair of them. Why had they chosen today to buddy up? Darla was dragged from her house before she could protest, Hopper’s voice yodelling farewell as he turned up the volume on his record player. Sasha’s eyes were shining and she was babbling with excitement.

  “An entire hour of country music, Darla!” she gasped. “He just wouldn’t stop playing it. Thank God you came home.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Darla muttered. “Seems to me you two were getting on just fine without me.”

  “Hey!” protested Sasha. “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That did not mean nothing.”

  “Forget about it,” Darla said stubbornly.

  “Weren’t you the one who told me to give your dad a chance? But now I get on with him, and that’s a problem too? Jeez, Darla, make up your mind!”

  Maybe Darla was being unfair. But something about the sight of Sasha and Hopper joking around together made her uncomfortable. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her daddy around her friends. But Sasha was no ordinary girl – for one thing she was strikingly beautiful, and for another she acted older than her age. It was a potentially dangerous combination.

  They walked down the lane in silence, Sasha moodily thrusting her hands in her pockets.

  “Wait,” said Darla, looking up and down the empty road. “Where’s Frank?”

  Sasha shrugged. “How should I know? Alphabetizing his sock-drawer, probably.”

  “You told Hopper we were going to his place to watch movies!”

  “Darla, of course I told Hopper we were going to his place to watch movies. How else were we going to get him to let you out?”

  “So you lied to him?”

  “It certainly looks that way.”

  “Sasha, what’s going on?”

  “Why are you always so suspicious? C’mon, it’s Saturday night – don’t you want to go out, just me and you?”

  Darla stopped, her hands on her hips.

  “No games, Sasha,” she said firmly. “Tell me where we’re going.”

  “To hear some music, OK?” said Sasha. “Some real music.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  When they reached the end of the creek lane Sasha stood on the verge of the highway, scanning the darkness for cars. Darla, who was already getting an ominous feeling about the night ahead, watched her dubiously.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “We’re going to need a ride,” replied Sasha, holding out her thumb. “Look appealing.”

  “You want us to hitch?” hissed Darla. “Are you crazy? There’s a serial killer on the loose!”

  “Yeah, I think I heard something about that,” Sasha said.

  “It’s not funny!”

  “Do you see me laughing? But Leeroy Mills is locked up in a prison cell where he can’t harm anyone and I think it’s time we stopped hiding under the blankets, you know what I’m saying?”

  “We don’t know that Leeroy was the Angel Taker.”

  “Oh, come off it, Darla!” Sasha sounded exasperated. “You saw inside his trailer – that guy was off-the-charts creepy. Total psycho. Don’t you remember him chasing us through the woods with a rifle? He could have killed Frank!”

  “I’m not saying Leeroy’s a good guy,” Darla said weakly. “I’m just not sure he’s the killer.”

  “OK, then, Sherlock Holmes, if the Angel Taker isn’t Leeroy, who is?”

  A car pulled over to the verge before Darla could reply. The window hummed down, revealing a bespectacled middle-aged man.

  “Kinda risky to be hitching tonight, ain’t it, girls?” he asked in a thick Southern accent. “There’s a killer been running around these parts.”

  “We know,” Sasha replied. “Our friend was supposed to be giving us a ride but her car broke down and now we’re late and we haven’t got money for a cab, so…” She trailed off hopefully.

  “Where are you headed?” asked the man.

  “You know Shooters?” said Sasha.

  He nodded. “I’ve heard of it. Lucky for you, I’m heading that way. You’d better hop in.”

  Darla tried to pull Sasha back, but she was too slow to prevent her friend diving gleefully into the backseat. Forget about the Angel Taker – at that moment Darla could have happily killed Sasha herself. But now her friend was alone in the back of a stranger’s car, so Darla had no choice but to get in after her. The vehicle smelled of leather polish and car soap, like it had just been bought straight from the dealers. An old country song was playing on the radio. ‘Stand By Your Man’ by Tammy Wynette – Darla had lost count of the times she heard it growing up.

  She dug her elbow into Sasha’s ribs. “Shooters?” she hissed. “Have you gone crazy? I can’t go to a bar – I haven’t got any ID!”

  Sasha laughed. “So? Neither have I. Relax, Darla!”

  She leaned forwards and asked the driver to turn up the radio. When he obliged she began singing along with Tammy Wynette in an out-of-key voice, having apparently called a temporary ceasefire on her war against country music. At least the old man driving them seemed harmless enough, even if his scrupulously clean car made Darla feel a little uneasy. Was he just proud of it, or had he spent hours sponging the blood of his hitchhiking victims from the upholstery? Everywhere she looked these days, Darla saw potential murderers.

  She stared out of the window at the dark creek as the car turned off the highway and rattled along a dirt track, tree branches scraping against the roof. Up ahead, the headlights picked out a building in the middle of a lonely patch of scrubland. The sign above the bar blared out the word ‘Shooters’ in violent green neon letters beside a blinking snake’s head. Metal grilles covered the windows, and the ground was littered with broken bottles. Motorcycles were parked in a row outside, a couple of bikers staring suspiciously at the car as it approached. There was a queue huddled outside the entrance, where a huge, shaven-headed man in a leather jacket filled the doorway.

  The driver eyed the bar dubiously. “You girls sure you want to get out here? This place looks kinda rough.”

  “It’s cool,” said Sasha. “Our boyfriends are waiting for us in the line.”

  “If you say so,” he replied. “Have a good night, y’all. Make sure you get home before the curfew.”

  “Thanks, we will!”

  They got out of the car, which performed a crunching U-turn across the gravel and drove away into the night. Now that she had left his backseat Darla had convinced herself that the driver wasn’t in fact a serial killer, and as his twinkling tail lights were swallowed up into the gloom she felt her last hopes disappearing with them. But there was no turning back now. Sasha grabbed Darla’s hand and marched her towards Shooters, ignoring the waiting line and heading straight for the fearsome-looking bouncer at the door.

  “Hey there, McGee,” said Sasha, grinning.

  He nodded back. “Hey, Sasha. Here for the bands?”

  “I hear it’s a killer line-up tonight.”

  McGee laughed roughly, a match striking across sandpaper. “You’re talking to the wrong guy,” he rasped. “They all sound terrible to me. Come on in.”

  “She’s with me,” said Sasha, casually jerking a thumb at Darla.

  Darla tried not to flinch as McGee looked her up and down. She didn’t look eighteen, let alone twenty-one. But to her amazement, McGee merely shrugged.

  “If you say so,” he said. He stamped both of their hands with an inked design of a snake and ushered them inside.

  It was dark within, bottles gleaming dirtily in the neon glare of the sign behi
nd the bar. Burly men with long hair and bandanas hunched over their drinks. It was exactly the kind of place Hopper liked: a dingy dive, where the shadows would hide your wrinkles and the grey in your hair, and you could pretend you were ten years younger. Darla could picture him at one of the stools at the bar, spinning stories made of hot air for whichever pretty girl would listen to him.

  “See?” Sasha said smugly. “I told you getting in wouldn’t be a problem. My family and McGee go way back. My dad helped get him off a charge a few years ago – so every now and again McGee does the odd favour in return.”

  “What kind of charge?” Darla asked dubiously. Sasha waved an airy hand. “I don’t know, there was some kind of fight. McGee’s not a bad guy.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Darla.

  They walked past the hulking bikers at the bar and headed deeper into Shooters, towards a staircase in the corner of the room. There was a door at the bottom of the rickety row of steps, with a homemade poster advertising a host of bands all ‘Playing Tonite’. Loud music flooded out from the basement, the thrashing guitars and pounding drums making the door pulse like a beating heart. Sasha clapped her hands together with delight and threw open the door.

  A wall of heat and noise hit Darla, making her take a step back. The basement of Shooters was a cramped room with low ceilings and a bar running the length of one wall. A three-piece punk band was playing on a stage in the corner of the room, a small crowd spraying beer everywhere as they pogoed up and down in front of them. The air was heavy with sweat and serrated guitar chords. Sasha’s cheeks flushed with excitement and her eyes shone as she slipped through the audience.

  “Isn’t this great?” she shouted.

  Darla nodded enthusiastically, not quite sure what to say. As Sasha queued for drinks at the bar Darla stood near the booths at the back of the room, watching the band play. The guitarist was a whirlwind of manic, angular energy, jamming out chords as he snarled into the microphone, whilst the dark-haired bassist kept his head down as he played, totally absorbed in the music. Their song came to a sudden, savage end, and the crowd whistled and roared their approval. Sasha reappeared, pressing a plastic glass of Coke into Darla’s hand. When Darla took a sip, she could taste the strong kick of rum. She glanced at Sasha but didn’t say anything. After another short number the band’s set came to an end and the crowd headed to the bar: girls with skinheads and boys wearing thick black eyeliner, old men in leather jackets running with sweat. Darla didn’t see a single face she recognized.