With all I’d done, I had to.
As I drove away from Allensburg, most of what I had was supposition. But that was the way it went in these cases. You never knew all the details, and even if you found out the reasons behind them, you could never understand. Men like Goddard were an alien species, and all anyone else could do was look on in horror. We could catch, but never cure or comprehend.
When I got back to Boston, I wiped down the Acura and left it in a mall parking lot, feeling suddenly empty.
I had nowhere left to go.
I had nothing to do.
I thought for a while, staring at the world from behind a glass wall, a partition that existed only in my mind, a line that separated me from them, the light from the dark. Then I took the long walk down to the harbor and called Teresa.
“How’s Rob doing?” I asked her.
“Alex?”
“I wanted to see him at the hospital, but I couldn’t. How is he? How are you?”
“He’s awake, and they say he’s getting better. Alex, Alex, what happened? What did you do?” Her voice choked like she was fighting tears.
“Nothing. I didn’t do anything. Someone tried to frame me for killing Tucker. Someone else wanted me dead and went after Rob. I’m sorry, Teresa. I’m sorry.”
Sobbing from the other end of the line.
“When you see Rob, tell him I’m sorry. I’ll come see him if I can, if that’s all right. But I never thought it would go as far as it did. I’m sorry.”
She sniffed hard, pulled herself together. “You can see him. He’d like that. I’d like that.”
“Thanks, Teresa. I will. Now I have to go.”
“Take care, Alex.”
I hung up, then made a quick call to my lawyer, explained to him where I was and what I was doing. He wasn’t happy, but he sounded confident about our chances of beating anything to do with Tucker. He didn’t ask me anything about Heller, or Kris, or Heller’s dead henchmen and the deaths at the abandoned refinery. All that murder and pain and grief, all that blood and fear, all of it was in the past. No one knew I’d been involved in any of it.
But I did.
I leaned on the railings, waiting by the water’s edge for the cops to finally catch up with me.
My life had been just an elaborate dream, painted on glass. But that dream was now irrevocably broken and through the cracks I could see the darkness inside.
The trouble was, when I looked at it now, I no longer knew which side of the glass I was on.
Afterword
If you’ve read the new version of The Touch Of Ghosts, you may know that I explain the reasons behind the notion of a “writer’s cut” of these books there. If you haven’t, you’re missing out on a stone-cold classic and you’re insane. And I in no way have any kind of motive for telling you so. No, no, the potted version is that the original Penguin version of that book (and of the sequel to this one, next on my list for a similar treatment), was a very different beast to what I’d originally wanted from the story. So, having the chance to go back and rework it into something better, something closer to the original, it seemed like a worthwhile thing to do.
Of the three former Penguin books I’m re-editing in this way, The Darkness Inside is the only one which went into and came out of the original editing process in more or less the same shape at both ends. Yes, there was a fair amount of work done on it, but the heart of the story remained the same. I suspect — and certainly hope — that this was because its core conceit was a good one. When the weeks and months roll by after a child is snatched and isn’t found, and especially on the (thankfully) rare occasions when there’s a spate of such crimes where the corpses of some of the victims are discovered, or when a confessed murderer is caught, we naturally assume that those taken are dead too, waiting to be found perhaps long after the event, perhaps never.
But what if you make that assumption and you’re wrong?
Good premise, and the story does a fair job of sticking to it, I think. There’s a sharp change of gear not long after Cody dies, but that was largely deliberate; a character can only wallow in self-reflection for so long before shit, to paraphrase Bad Boys II, needs to get real. I’ve given it a thorough polishing, and there have been a few larger amendments where whole scenes have been excised, but nothing on the scale of the previous book.
No, the main problem with The Darkness Inside was that no one much ever got to read it. While I always had a good relationship with my editor at Penguin, this book was the centerpiece of a chain of clusterfucks that saw it limp out of the door, unwanted and unloved, a very long time after it should have done, all through no fault of mine. (I won’t go into the whole sorry story here — griping like this is what the internet’s for, after all — but to give you some idea, I finished the first draft on deadline in November 2004, and the whole editing process was complete by the end of the following spring. The book didn’t appear until April 2007. Chief delay was the 15 months it took to get a cover.)
Now of course, no one will read it again, but at least that’s because of the difficulty of finding an audience when self-publishing, not because it simply isn’t out there to be read.
It’s been interesting, to me at least, to see how much my writing style had developed between The Touch Of Ghosts and this book. How I was stumbling towards what eventually became the voice used in the novels I’ve written as Sean Cregan, though not without falling over a few times, and how much I’d already moved away from the wordier “first I got up and then I had a piece of toast” style of the earlier story. The writing process had been very different too, not least because the girlfriend I was living with upped and left me about a quarter of the way through and I took a long time to recover. (By the time the book actually came out, I’d met someone else, broken up, got back together, moved in and was a couple of weeks shy of the birth of my first child, which goes to show what a weird swathe of life the original version straddled.) Maybe I came back grimmer, more clipped. Who knows?
Incidentally, elements of Holly’s captivity are based on real events. Not the Fritzl case, which broke a year after this book fell out of Penguin’s warehouse into a large puddle, but an earlier one from the 70s, where a hitchhiking 20-year-old was abducted by a man and his wife and lived as a slave for years. The ‘contract’, the coffin-like container, the degree of psychological control over the girl in question, those things came from an actual real-world crime. (There were differences; you can read up on the case of “Carol Smith” online if you’re so inclined.) Horrible stuff.
So there you have it. I hope you’ve enjoyed The Darkness Inside, and that you will check/have checked out the other stories in the new Rourke series. Whether you liked the book or hated it, you can, as always, find me on Twitter as @Nameless_Horror or online at http://namelesshorror.com. I don’t bite.
- John R., December 2012.
Copyright & Credits
Copyright John Rickards 2012.
Cover image is this one by D Sharon Pruitt, with broken glass textures by jinterwas from here and here, all used under a cc-by license.
Also By The Author
Writing as John Rickards:
The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer’s Cut
Burial Ground: Writer’s Cut (coming soon)
The Desperate, The Dying, And The Damned (coming soon)
Writing as Sean Cregan:
Day Zero
Murder Park
All You Leave Behind
The Levels
The Razor Gate
Hardboiled Jesus (short story)
Wishes (short stories)
The Unpublishable (short stories)
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The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut Page 28
