Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
First Edition
Mr. Midnight © 2013 by Allan Leverone
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
My father, Alfred Leverone, was an avid reader, but rarely of fiction. He preferred biographies and historical accounts, mostly of the American Revolution and Civil War, two subjects about which his curiosity was unquenchable and his knowledge impressive.
I’m unlikely to ever write a nonfiction book on either of those subjects, so this novel is dedicated to my dad. He died nearly seventeen years ago, more than a decade before I signed my first publishing contract, but I know he would have been proud, as well as mystified, by how far this particular apple fell from the tree.
My dad taught me the value of hard work, of honesty, of doing the right thing even when no one’s looking. He wasn’t rich or famous, but if I can be half the man he was, I’ll consider my life a resounding success. This book is for him.
Acknowledgements
If you’ve read the acknowledgements in any of my other books, I run the risk of sounding like a broken record, but this bears repeating: I am utterly indebted to my wife, Sue, for her unwavering support since the very first day I told her I wanted to make stuff up and write it down. When I was receiving literally hundreds of rejections from agents and publishers, Sue provided the quiet voice of encouragement that kept me writing when any sane man would long ago have given up.
DarkFuse Senior Editor Greg Gifune accepted this novel and worked with me to make it as powerful as possible, including offering a critical editorial suggestion that turned a solid horror novel into something special, at least in my opinion.
DarkFuse founder and Managing Publisher Shane Staley worked with me on my two novellas released by the precursor to DarkFuse, Delirium Books. For nearly a decade and a half, Shane has provided horror readers with a consistently high-quality reading experience, as well as access to unique releases by some of the most respected names in the horror fiction community.
Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to every single reader who has seen fit to plunk down his or her hard-earned cash on one of my books. I may not know you, and will probably never meet you, but you are always in my mind when I’m writing. I take very seriously my responsibility to entertain you, and always will. Thank you for giving my work a chance.
CHAPTER 1
Stalking.
Mr. Midnight was stalking.
He trailed along behind his two targets carefully, keeping to the shadows as much as possible, staying a healthy distance while being sure to keep them in sight at all times. The girls were college students; that much he knew. Whether they attended B.U., Northeastern, Tufts, or any of the dozens of other schools in the Boston area, the predator didn’t know and didn’t care.
What mattered to Mr. Midnight was that the girls were clearly from out of town, new students still unaware of the lines of demarcation the more experienced students observed automatically, which allowed them to stay safe. Relatively speaking.
Mr. Midnight had been following the pair for twenty minutes, ever since observing them as they stumbled, drunk, out of a raucous apartment party on Commonwealth Avenue. He had been loitering in the dark recesses of a doorway across the street and gotten a vibe about the girls almost immediately.
Now they were lost, and confused, and just beginning to feel the first tentative twinges of apprehension. Alcohol bravery and the fact that they were together and could count on each other for support had suppressed the panic thus far, but Mr. Midnight knew it was mere minutes away from bubbling to the surface.
He picked up his pace and moved silently closer, now near enough to hear bits and pieces of their conversation. “…think we went in the wrong direction,” the one on the left was saying. She had a nice, shapely ass packed into low-rise jeans. Her crop-top blouse didn’t come close to reaching her waist and the predator thought he could see the hint of a thong peeking out over the jeans. He smiled with approval.
“…don’t recognize anything…” the other one said. She was Asian, a slim, tiny girl poured into a red mini-dress.
“Maybe we should turn around,” the first girl said. Mr. Midnight was close enough to them now that he could hear their voices clearly. Both girls sounded near tears and the predator felt himself becoming aroused.
The area was unfamiliar.
The streetlights were dim and spaced far apart.
Pedestrian traffic was minimal.
It was time to move.
Mr. Midnight closed the remaining distance between himself and the girls, still unsure of which one he would take, not that it mattered. They were both young and pretty, and he knew he would be more than satisfied with either.
It was almost too easy. The predator wore Nike cross-trainers and moved with a practiced stealth, and the frightened girls were chattering to each other like magpies in an effort to keep their mounting fear at bay.
They were crossing in front of a Catholic grade school, the Victorian-era stone structure looming in the semidarkness behind a padlocked chain-link fence, when the predator struck. He used the butt of his knife to club the girl on the left—he glanced down and discovered he had been right about the thong—in the temple. She let out a low moan and dropped straight down, unconscious before her body hit the concrete sidewalk with a wet thud.
The second girl, the tiny Asian in the mini-dress, gasped and froze, trying to process in her alcohol-addled brain what had just happened. A half-second later she drew in a breath to scream, but by then it was much too late. Mr. Midnight slapped a hand over her mouth and lifted the knife to her throat, running its razor-sharp point along her silky skin like a lover’s caress. Blood immediately began welling up in the furrow.
The girl stopped struggling, undoubtedly hoping compliance would equate to survival.
She wouldn’t find out until much later how wrong she was.
CHAPTER 2
; The air inside the Super-K Grocerette felt pleasantly cool to Caitlyn Connelly as she waited in line at the register. A low-pressure system had stalled over Tampa, the moisture in the atmosphere combining with the blazing heat to form a mushy tropical blanket over eastern Florida.
Through the plate-glass windows fronting the store, Caitlyn watched as people trudged across the parking lot. They seemed to move in slow motion, as if bogged down by the weather.
The line dragged, Cait inching forward until eventually she stood behind only an elderly woman who had placed her purchases—roughly a fifty-fifty split between food for herself and food for her pets—on the conveyor belt and now reached into a purse approximately the size of a small European car for her wallet.
Cait felt a sensation of pressure inside her skull, a wave rolling over her brain. She blinked twice and her head rocked back slightly. It was the sort of reaction a person might have if confronted with a completely unexpected sight. The image of a tiny kitchen flashed into her head. The room was shabby but spotlessly clean. On top of faded linoleum tiles that had been out of style for half a century, Cait saw a checkbook that had fallen to the floor and now lay against a leg of an ancient kitchen table.
A pair of sleeping cats sprawled on either side of the checkbook, looking like furry bookends, and Cait knew instantly what had happened. The woman had placed her purse at the edge of the table in preparation for her trip to the store—she shopped twice a week, Monday and Thursday—but she had mistakenly left it unclasped. The checkbook had fallen out of the purse when she picked it up, in a hurry because the taxi arrived sooner than expected, and it would simply be wrong to make the poor driver wait.
Caitlyn wasn’t guessing about any of it. She knew what had happened because she could see it in her mind as clearly as if it were playing on a high-definition television screen in front of her. She didn’t know how she could see it in her mind, only that she could. She had been experiencing these visions—“Flickers,” she called them, due to their short but intense nature—for as long as she could remember.
The Flickers were, as far as she could tell, completely random occurrences. Sometimes they disappeared for days, the visions going silent for such long stretches of time Cait began to think maybe they had disappeared for good, only to return with a vengeance, dozens of the intense mental movies blasting into her head over the course of a few hours.
More often than not, though, she experienced one or two per day. They seemed normal and natural to Caitlyn because she had been living with them her entire life, but she had years ago given up trying to explain them to anyone else, tired of putting up with the amused smiles or exasperated looks of people who simply did not believe her.
Back in the Super-K, the elderly woman began frantically digging through the gigantic purse, looking for the checkbook she would not find, apologizing for holding up the line. The cashier, a bored teenage girl with purple-dyed hair who demonstrated her annoyance by snapping her bubble gum every few seconds, stood with one hand on her hip. She rolled her eyes at a heavyset woman standing in line behind Cait.
“Oh, dear,” the elderly woman said, “I’m so sorry. I know I had my checkbook with me and now it’s simply disappeared.”
“Listen, lady,” the woman behind Cait said, “we all have places to be. How about you step aside while you try to get your act together—not that you’ll be able to—so the rest of us,”—she raised her arms like Moses parting the Red Sea—“can pay for our stuff and get the hell out of here.”
The elderly woman was now almost in tears, flustered and confused. Cait turned and stared down the woman behind her, locking eyes until the woman turned away impatiently. Cait returned her gaze to Alice—that was the elderly woman’s name, the knowledge came to Cait without warning—and said gently, “Do you think you might have forgotten your checkbook at home?”
“I suppose I must have, but I can’t imagine how. I always prepare in advance for my trip to the grocery store. I place everything on the table in the morning while drinking my tea. I do it the same way every time to avoid this exact problem. Now, where could that checkbook be?” She began digging through her purse again.
Cait put an arm on her shoulder. “I’ll pay for your things.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t allow you to do that.”
“Of course you can,” she answered gently. “I’ll pay for your purchases and then this nice young woman behind the counter will give me a slip of paper. I’ll write my name and address on it, and when you get home and find your checkbook, you can mail me a check for the cost of your groceries. How does that sound?”
“Well, I don’t know…”
The woman behind Cait snorted impatiently and Alice said, “All right, yes, I think that would be fine. Thank you so much, young lady.”
Cait paid the cashier for both sets of groceries and then helped the woman load the bags into the trunk of her tiny car, glad to be out of the store. The incident had left a sour taste in her mouth and she felt badly for the old woman, who was obviously alone in the world. She wondered about her history. Was there a husband who had passed, leaving Alice to live out her final years alone? Were there children in the picture who visited once a week, bringing a much-needed break from the loneliness and isolation?
Cait considered the Flickers a normal part of her life. She had long ago stopped thinking of them as strange or unusual, but sometimes they were just so damned frustrating. The mental movies the Flickers provided were almost always incomplete, lacking any sense of context or cohesion—as in Alice’s case, where she learned just enough about the woman’s life to become curious—leaving her unhappy and upset.
Of course, she thought as she wheeled her bags to her car, I don’t know much more of my own history than I do of Alice’s. Someday that will change, she vowed.
Someday.
Cait loaded her groceries and drove slowly out of the lot. Over Tampa the clouds swirled, becoming thicker and blacker by the minute. A storm was coming, and by all appearances, it was going to be a bad one.
CHAPTER 3
Thirty Years Ago
Everett, Massachusetts
Robert Ayers paced relentlessly, unwilling to leave his wife’s side but unable to stand still. Back and forth he walked, mopping Virginia’s sweaty brow, holding her hand, then marching to the bedroom door before turning on his heel and retracing his steps to her bed.
Shadows crept across the floor as the sun lowered in the late-afternoon sky, the hands on Robert’s watch moving simultaneously fast and slow. Virginia moaned and thrashed, screaming at the onset of a contraction, relaxing when the pain eased. Sweat poured down her face.
“This is insane,” Robert muttered. “She should be in a hospital. The days of giving birth at home ended decades ago. This is unsafe, especially if something goes wrong.”
On the other side of the bed stood a stranger dressed in grubby medical scrubs, a pair of latex gloves pulled over his hands. As far as Robert could discern, the man had done little but observe quietly as Virginia screamed and suffered. The man shot him a dark glance but said nothing.
“She should be in the hospital,” Robert repeated. He stopped pacing for a moment and leaned over, stroking his wife’s cheek gently with the backs of his fingers. Her eyes were closed and she didn’t seem to notice.
“Up to you,” the stranger said. “It’s your choice. Call an ambulance if you wish, but understand I get paid my full fee regardless of your decision.”
Robert Ayers glared at his guest. “You’re concerned about your fee? Jesus Christ, you’ll get your money, don’t worry about that.”
“Jesus Christ has nothing to do with this,” the stranger shot back, grinning darkly, revealing dual rows of yellowing teeth, irregular stumps thrusting at odd angles out of an unhealthy mouth. For what felt like the hundredth time, Roger wondered where in the hell his wife had found this man, this disgraced medical professional who had been stripped of his license to practice and now skulked about in the n
ight, earning a living providing medical care deep in the shadows outside accepted society.
He called himself “Doctor Jones”—Robert hoped the man was better at doctoring than thinking up aliases—and when Robert had asked Virginia a few days ago where she had found him, she had been unable or unwilling to provide a satisfactory answer.
Locating and hiring “Doctor Jones” was just the latest example of the strange and frightening ability manifested by his wife on occasion. Robert had been completely unaware of her unusual gift until after they married. At times Robert thought “bizarre” would be a better description of Virginia’s ability to place herself inside the minds of other people, strangers she had never before met and would never see again.
It was creepy and unsettling.
After their marriage, Virginia had described her unusual talent to Robert to the best of her ability, begging his forgiveness for not telling him sooner but admitting she feared the knowledge might frighten him away. “And I can’t live without you,” she told him tearfully.
She described the moments of incredible insight—“brain movies,” she called them—that came upon her without warning, flashes of thoughts or mental pictures. They represented experiences other people were having, things they might be thinking or plans they might be making.
Suddenly, the strange, thought-provoking scenarios that had occurred over the course of their courtship—none momentous when considered on its own, but all quite disturbing when added together—all made sense. The empathetic connection Virginia seemed sometimes to share with random strangers, her inexplicable flashes of insight into lives and situations of which she should have no knowledge, all of it.
Initially he had been hurt and angry, even frightened. Then, after some time and reflection, Robert had decided it was far from the worst thing that could happen. Quite the opposite, actually, it was in some ways reassuring. Virginia wasn’t a freak, she was simply a young woman with an unusual, almost mystical ability; a gift she had not asked for and could not divest herself of even if she wanted to.
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