The Dark Corners Box Set

by Robert Scott-Norton

  “Let go of me,” Judy demanded, striking Adam with her fist, punching on his arm. He barely reacted, his attention was solely on the painting in front of him, his eyes wide with a childlike fascination as the colours practically hummed on the canvas.

  “It’s incredible,” he breathed. “Kain, are you there?”

  At first, it seemed that the shadowman in the composition had shifted, but it was the paint that was liquefying, and as they watched, the paint slowly meandered into tiny trickles, before pulling together into wider streams.

  “Ow!” Judy cried. She had pulled back her sleeve to reveal the painting that had made a home on her. The paint looked fresh on her arm as well and that too was moving.

  Adam shoved her against the painting.

  Seth couldn’t get to her in time. As her arm struck the canvas, the painting reacted like a stone dropping into a pond, breaking the surface causing ripples to strike out in concentric circles. The paint on the canvas began to flow towards her arm.

  Judy’s expression locked. Her eyes glazed over and she stood, compliant but immobile.

  “Uncle Seth,” Joe whispered. “What’s happening?”

  Seth put a hand on the boy’s head, then quickly, he fought to untie his bindings. The bindings had been done poorly and Seth had them undone quickly. Seth bent down so his lips were close to Joe’s ear. “Run. It’s dark outside, and there are more men out there that you’ve got to keep away from. But you’re fast. Get to the road and find somewhere to hide. We’ll come and get you.”

  “I can’t,” Joe said, shaking his head. “I need you.”

  “I’ve got to stop this. You understand. And I can’t do this and look after you.”

  Joe’s eyes sought his, and a glance passed between them. He didn’t need telling a second time. Without a sound, he took off from his chair and ran.

  Seth watched him go and felt a pang of guilt and relief. He was too small to be out in the dark on his own but he was smart and resilient and there was something about him that he recognised in himself. A resourcefulness that he felt sure would guide him.

  Tendrils of paint exploded from the canvas, a web of colour. They touched Judy’s skin but she didn’t react, not even when more paint found its way inside her mouth and her nostrils.

  Judy was being absorbed by the painting and there was nothing Seth could do about it.

  37

  Joe would not let his uncle down. He’d promised himself that he wouldn’t leave him to face the burnt man alone. The nice lady was with him and that was good, but it was still an uneven fight. Two against two but Joe knew there were more of the bad guys around the house.

  When he’d been brought here, he’d appeared in the basement. He didn’t fully understand how he’d gone from being at home to being in the basement but it had involved the doorways. When the burnt man had grabbed him and pulled him backwards, he’d had a sense like falling out of bed, but there was no floor to meet him; he’d just fallen straight out of the second doorway and into the basement.

  The burnt man had promised that he wouldn’t be hurt if he did as he was told, but that was just another lie. He’d injured his mum and dad. Joe was finding it hard to fight back the tears at the thought of his parents. Dad had looked hurt and the way Mum was screaming made him think this was a serious. The burnt man was lying about not hurting Joe. He’d overheard him talking to one of the other men and he’d told him to ‘dispose of the boy’ at the first opportunity. That was just clever words to mean that he was to be killed when they were ready.

  He understood he was a hostage. He’d heard that word before and knew in his heart that he couldn’t really do anything about it. All he could do was as his uncle had asked. He had to get as far away from the house as possible.

  But leaving the house was not a good idea. He didn’t like the idea of running away in a place he didn’t know. He was bound to get lost and then he’d have to speak to strangers which was out of the question. And if there were more bad people, it made sense that they would chase after him. What if they hurt him to teach him a lesson?

  At the top of the basement stairs, he listened to the grown-ups below. Things had gone relatively quiet before he’d heard the burnt man talking to a new person.

  He pulled open the basement door a fraction and peeked through the gap. There were smells that he didn’t like that reminded him of the bottom of the bin when he’d been made to take the bin bags out. He understood that was the smell of something rotting and he immediately put his hand over his mouth and nose, worried that he was breathing in something poisonous.

  His chest hurt as his heart hammered away. That along with the smell was making him feel light-headed. He missed Mum. She would have picked him up and squeezed him in one of her special bear hugs and told him that everything would be all right. It would have been a lie, but he’d have gladly accepted it.

  Beyond the door, was a hallway. The carpet was missing from the floor and the walls were not nice with flaking paint and strange marks on them. But it was dark. He waited another few seconds forcing himself to look into the darkness, letting his eyes adjust, and when he felt that things wouldn’t get any easier, he stepped out and headed to his right. There was a door there. It looked like the main door and despite promising himself he would not run away; he was compelled to check it to make sure he had an escape route.

  The door wouldn’t open. He bit his lip.

  It doesn’t matter, he told himself. You weren’t going to leave, anyway. He backtracked, his ears attuned for the slightest noise, his eyes well adjusted, and he soon found himself in the kitchen. The smell was worse in here but he fought his instincts to turn around and instead headed for the back door. Locked. This door took a key though and that might still be close. A quick search of the nearest shelves and the countertops proved futile. In the movies, he’d seen people kick down doors. Tentatively, he raised a leg and tried to force it down as hard as he could on the wooden panel at the bottom of the door. The door didn’t so much as shake but his leg really felt the impact. That wasn’t going to happen.

  What else was there in here? Something that must help.

  Smoke would make a good distraction. He’d seen that in TV shows. The bad guys always hated it because you could hide in the smoke and that was just what they needed now. But to make smoke you needed fire. Candles? He couldn’t see any. Matches?

  He pulled open the drawers around the cooker, but besides a few random pieces of cutlery and squares of newspaper, they were empty.

  Joe’s eyes settled on the hob. If he could find something to burn, he could use the hob to light it. His dad used to use the cooker hob to light sparklers on bonfire night when the safety lighters didn’t work.

  He tired the leftmost burner on the hob. The gas switched on easily enough, then he looked for the ignition switch. His heart dropped as he couldn’t find it. This was a different cooker to what he had at home. Didn’t they all have those switches?

  Disappointedly, he resolved to find a different way to cause a distraction and twisted the knob to turn the gas off. The knob came off in his hand. He stared at it for a moment, unsure what had just happened. His first thought was that he would get into trouble for damaging the cooker, but he shoved that aside in a rapidly rising panic as he realised the hiss he was hearing was the unlit gas still coming out from the hob.

  He knew enough to appreciate this was very bad. Gas burnt, but too much all at once and it could explode. He spun around, he would have to get help, a grownup to turn it off. Surely that had to be a thing. A safe way to turn off the gas in case this exact thing happened? You wouldn’t just let a cooker live in your house that was so easy to break because, well it could cause a fire or an explosion and…

  Joe thought he heard someone moving around outside. He ducked below the cupboards, below window height. It would be another one of the burnt man’s friends, possibly searching for him. It had been several minutes since he’d snuck away from the basement. They’d be l
ooking for him by now.

  Ignoring the cooker problem for the time being, Joe scanned the room, trying to decide whether it would be better to leave the kitchen and find a new hiding place or exit.

  He glanced around the edge of the cupboard and saw his new objective. The windows on the other side of the room by the sink. He could get out through there. He held his breath, tried to ignore his thumping heart—it was making his ears hurt it was so loud—but he couldn’t see any sign of anyone outside. Maybe they’d got bored and moved on somewhere else, or more likely, it wasn’t one of the burnt man’s friends looking, it could just as easily have been an animal, an owl or a bat. Animals didn’t bother him. He knew enough that there wasn’t any wildlife outside that would hurt him. This was the English countryside and the scariest thing he’d be likely to see would be a fox, and they never went for humans. They were too scared themselves.

  Quickly, he dragged a chair from the kitchen table and positioned it by the countertop. Then, he clambered up onto the countertop and unlatched the window. The hinge was stiff and it hurt his fingers trying to lift the metal arm from its catch, but eventually, with a squeal of alarm, the arm lifted and he pushed the window open. Sticking his head out, he checked where he would land, then taking a single glance behind him, he swung his legs in front of him and pushed himself out.

  Joe winced and clutched his arm. He’d caught it on part of the frame as he dropped.

  A wood was ahead of him. The house was on its own on a hillside. He couldn’t see any neighbours he could run to for help. It was a very odd place for a house to be built, he decided, and from the outside, the stone walls and crumbling outbuilding made the place look sick and tired. It was the perfect place for a bad man to live.

  Keeping close to the perimeter wall, he stepped around the house, and when he got to the corner, he held his breath and listened. A light breeze carried the ugly, rotten smell of the house through the air and rustled the trees in the distance. He wondered whether he’d be happy to make a break for the woods, but the thought of being alone in the woods was enough to make him want to cry.

  A footstep close by made him freeze.

  There was at least one person out here.

  And there was no reason for anyone to be out here unless they were friends with the burnt man, and the burnt man wanted Joe tied to a chair. Uncle Seth had told him to get as far away as he could and find somebody that could help him. That meant he had to avoid everyone until he got down to the lights on the other side of the woods. He didn’t think this was Southport. There were no hills like these anywhere close to where he lived. Suddenly the realisation that even if he got down past the wood, he would still be lost in a strange town filled him with a horrible dread. A weight dragged through his belly and made it difficult to move.

  But the footsteps were getting closer. One person, he figured. He looked behind him, saw the open window of the kitchen and realised he’d made a mistake in not closing it. When the footsteps got to the corner and saw it, they’d realise that he’d escaped through it and would start looking for him outside. Stupid. Now he really wanted to cry.

  Joe kept his back to the wall, feeling the uneven stone dig into his back, and he edged along the wall to the kitchen window. If he could close it in time, he might still be OK. Then he could run for one of the crumbling outbuildings. There would be no one there and it would give him a chance to think.

  The footsteps sped up. Joe’s attention flipped from the kitchen window to the corner of the house, not quite believing that his attempt at escape had been so useless. When he saw the edge of the man’s body turning the corner, he lost it completely. Joe abandoned his plan of closing the window, too late for that, and instead ran as fast as he could for the path beyond the garden. He might still be fast enough to make it to the woods. However scary the thought of the woods was, it was nothing compared to the thought of being caught by the man.

  The man had seen him move though, and the footsteps turned into a run. Joe abandoned all attempt at being quiet and he sprinted, stumbling on the uneven ground. Gravel sliding beneath his feet.

  And then the man was so close behind him he could hear his rapid breathing over his own, and then arms were around him, yanking him back, stopping his forward motion and almost pulling him to the floor.

  “Get off!” Joe blurted before a hand clamped across his mouth. Joe bit down hard, his teeth finding the fleshy part of the hand and coming together brutally.

  The hand dropped away. And his captor let out a yelp of pain.

  It was a voice Joe recognised. The horrible weight in his stomach melted. He spun around, not quite believing what he was seeing.

  “That’s quite some bite you’ve got there,” his dad said, clutching his hand and looking every inch as relieved as Joe felt.

  38

  The painting didn’t suggest it was about to let Judy go. Tentacles of oil pigment were still rushing from the canvas, forming a tangled web that had snarled up his friend. She wasn’t moving anymore. Her face was pressed in a grimace of bewilderment and fear.

  Seth couldn’t look.

  Adam couldn’t tear his eyes away.

  The leader of the Adherents had taken a judicious few steps away from Judy, clearly uneasy with not knowing how this worked or what might happen next. Seth could run and try to get help but by the time anyone else got to the house, it would be over for Judy. Once Kain arrived, there was nothing keeping the Adherents here, and Adam had already demonstrated an ability to use the Almost Doors for travel. At the first sign of a problem, Adam would summon a door and escape.

  That wouldn’t do, not whilst Judy was his captive.

  Seth surveyed the room, hunting for something that could help him finish this madness. His first thought was that he had to get Judy away from the painting, but that was shushed down by the worry that he had no idea what that might do to her. Whatever was happening to her body, it had to be like how the shadowmen hitched rides on bodies. He’d already seen how that could be reversed. Back at the hospital, they’d used the Almost Doors to rip the hitchers from their unwilling hosts and fire them back to the Almost Realm. If he could get to one of the doorways in the other room, he could try opening that and seeing what happened. It couldn’t be any worse than what was already taking place.

  As he observed Judy’s skin, the parts that weren’t masked by the paint tendrils had turned an unhealthy pallid grey. This was not going well for her body.

  Seth hurried to the other end of the cellar, the side adjoining the staircase. He disregarded the escape route with barely a glance and fixated on the three Almost Doors.

  Wait, there were only two doors when they’d first crossed through this part of the cellar. The third door was new.

  But it was one that he remembered all too well.

  He’d last seen this door in the bedroom wall of his childhood when he was six years old.

  This was the door that had started it all.

  It stunned him. Seth froze. The other two doors in the room were active, their edges jade with the energy from the Almost Realm. This heavy door, with the peeling forest green paint and acorn shaped handle, was as dormant as it had been when it had first appeared in Seth’s bedroom.

  If the door was here, Seth pondered, did that mean that Charlie was as well?

  Without considering whether this was a good idea, Seth ran to the door, happy to take advantage of any outcome involving his lifelong hitcher.

  But before he could get there, he tripped and tumbled into a different place.

  When a vision struck, it usually came with a warning, a tension at the back of the head, or fluttering from the side of his eyes, a hint that his senses were about to be overridden. This time there was no warning, he was flung into the vision with all the grace of a granite block dropping into a frozen pond.

  The other place that Seth found himself in was instantly recognisable. The Scardovi house was not somewhere he thought he’d ever forget in a hurry. He was upstai
rs, and his view was floating. What he was experiencing was just a recollection of sorts. A memory of events. He wouldn’t be interacting with anyone he saw.

  This annoyed the hell out of him. It was one thing to be able to talk with the dead, but it was frustrating to be trapped in auto-playing memories that he had no command over.

  Seth was observing a man who was watching a painting. The man was Kain Scardovi, the painting was All the Darkness, and it was complete. Propped on an easel, some other paintings Seth had seen a few days ago were alongside, some hung on the walls of Kain’s studio, others rested on the floor.

  Kain was brooding, staring, his fingers steepled in front of him, his face taut with concentration. Seeing him like this, as close to in-person as Seth ever wanted to get, left a nasty feeling in his stomach. There was an intensity to him that threatened to drag you in, but as an Adherent of the Fourth, that would only ever have been used to draw the vulnerable into the group.

  How long ago was this? Seth couldn’t tell. The artist was about as old as he’d seemed in the photo he’d found on the Internet. Mid-forties. He wore a t-shirt and shorts. It could have been an artist’s outfit for painting or something he’d woken up wearing.

  Kain left the room. The sun was still low in the sky. Seth reckoned it was early morning, and those fresh morning rays were piercing through the slatted blinds against the window, throwing shards of golden light against the naked floorboards. That same light caught the blade in Kain’s hand, the handle clutched in a tight grip.

  “Joceline!” His voice pierced the silence.

  The vision shifted. The knife was now at Joceline’s throat. She was younger. Her skin clear of the wrinkles and sagging cheeks that had aged her so badly when he’d met her in real life.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said to her husband, her voice wobbling. “You’ve got it all wrong.”

  “I’ve got nothing wrong. I know you’ve been sleeping around.”