Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction

by Maria Grazia Cavicchioli

  Lines do blur.

  “Um,” I said. But that was it.

  Orlov’s beard was quivering, his mouth opening and closing, but he could get no words out.

  Breshinski’s spectacles just flashed in the moonlight, his lips mashing together absurdly.

  Finally, the young Professor Irkin spoke, his already pallid face turned waxy, his voice barely a whisper. “We need to open it,” he said. “It is what we came here for.”

  There was no argument. Not externally, at least. This was bravado. Internally, I am positive it was each versus himself in a logic death match.

  In near unison, we took a step forward and stopped. We looked round at one another, nervous eyes meeting before flickering away. Silently, we agreed to cautiously continue pressing toward the sarcophagus — and we did so until we were bloodying our shoes alongside it.

  There is the fear one experiences when coming face to face in life with something only experienced before in one’s nightmares. Call this one… horror. When you feel the chilled breath of the dead on your neck, when you hear her laugh, when you hear her phantom footsteps clicking up the street behind you and you realise there is nothing you can do to stop her, it is horror you will feel.

  “We’ll need to push all together,” I said, the first to lay hands on the cold stone cover.

  The others nodded solemnly, and followed suit.

  “On three.”

  Professor Irkin counted, “a’deen, dva, tri,” and we heaved, pushing the heavy cover off, causing a terrible crunching thud as it hit the floor.

  We gasped in unison at the sight before us. We gasped, each taking in a lungful of stale air. Death’s exhalation.

  In the sarcophagus, we found neither life nor death, but a collection of confirmed fears, doubts, worries, anxieties, suspicions, dreads, terrors, and horrors.

  In the sarcophagus, we found… nothing.

  3. Bestial

  Before I was out of my twenties, I had circumnavigated the globe, and now, barely into my thirties, I had travelled half that distance again. Searching. Searching for them. The fabled vampire. Or, more specifically in this case, the feared strigoi morţi. The creature I had this time travelled 1600 miles to meet, and the creature which would once again stand me up. Yes, I would have to wait to find out if the vampire did, indeed, exist in the form we commonly imagine. And, truth be told, I was beginning to wonder if the world would ever come to know the answer.

  With each new story, each new novel, movie, or video game, a new layer is added to the already turbid field of cryptozoology, enveloping this mythicised beast in pulp paper, celluloid, and digital data. The mythos builds, shrouding the horrible truth in best-selling fiction. Blanketing accuracy in absurdity. Lining pockets with lies. But, I would be different. I had set out to prove that there was at least a modicum of fact behind the fantasy. And time was running out. Our lives are finite, after all.

  But what was this elusive proof for which I searched? I didn’t even know. Was the proof being chased out of the catacombs in France by little more than a haunting voice inside my head? Was it feeling the cold breath of death on my cheek exhaled from an empty sarcophagus outside a tiny village in Romania? If I had, indeed, already discovered what I was looking for, then it was beyond the scope of my own understanding. Our understanding.

  I discovered no solid proof in the catacombs of France or the sepulchres in Romania. Nor the crypts in New Orleans, the mausoleums in Italy, or the cemeteries in eastern Canada. And the tombs, chambers, grottos, vaults, and necropolises the world over had all turned up no hard evidence. Each year turned up little. Each year, I grew older.

  “Beyond our scope,” I muttered under my breath, smirking a little to myself. I drained the rest of my vodka before snatching another off of the waiter’s tray. I loosened my tie.

  “Understanding,” I snickered, shaking my weary head. Living side by side for millennia. Us, as blissful in our ignorance as ants living beside a busy highway. No concept of the bigger picture. No ability to know the greater creatures whizzing past us encased in glass and steel. Just happy in the hive.

  Tonight, a party, far from the comforts of home. This was Russia’s intelligentsia. The gold-leafed home of an American diplomat filled to the brim with politicians and professors. Scholars and scientists. Movie stars and musicians. The clink-clinking of glasses rose above the din, absurd alcoholic concoctions, pretty and pink. Lame jokes and affected laughter falling flat in opaque air.

  Mingling. Circulating. Networking. Schmoozing. “What do you do?” was the question on everyone’s lips. I made up a new name for each new person, and told them all I was a labourer — and it wasn’t far from the truth. The search had not been going well, and there would be no talk of it tonight.

  A suspicious, steely blue eye tried in vain to squint beneath the slender arch of an over-plucked, drawn-in eyebrow. The beast’s collagen-pumped lips parted slightly. “Vat type of labour?” it purred.

  “General,” I answered.

  The beast tried to smile, but couldn’t for the Botox. Or maybe it never learned how; smiling is unique to humans, after all.

  Her eyes looked deep into mine, studying. “Vye are you lying to me?” she asked coldly. “Our host, Mr. Anders, tells me that you are an explorer of sorts. A scientist, yes?”

  My teeth inexplicably chattered slightly against the rim of the glass as I took a gulp of vodka. These nerves. These god-damned nerves. I was never great at talking to these women. These artificial people. These ageing socialites. These lionesses. No, I was never quite comfortable around these old money players, but this… this was ridiculous.

  “You are a shy one, hey?” she asked through perfect white teeth, the taut flesh of her obscenely rouged face straining to form a smirk. “Vell, no matter. I have entertained more than my share of shy men.”

  I drained my glass — fire down my throat. Hastily motioned for the waiter to bring me another.

  “Oh, you do not need to bother,” she growled, “I have a fresh bottle back in my room.”

  “I — I’m sorry,” I sputtered. “You’ll have to excuse me a moment.”

  In the lavatory. I was comfortable there, with the party little more than a barely audible hoo-ha through the wall. Just me and the bass line. Leaning against the inside of a stall, staring down at the toilet and the floor, I tried to clear my mind. I focused on all the coke that had likely been snorted in that very space. In fact, there was probably enough for a line right there between the ceramic tiles.

  How many times had the same scene played out there before? Fine white powder, chopped up with a platinum card on a cigarette pack. Sliced into a line. The careful rolling of a note. Breathe in, nice and slow. Feel the drip. Taste it. Acerbic. Medicinal. The packet of posh slipped back into a coat pocket. A stretch and an exit. A confident re-entry, a seamless shuffling of one into many. But, that wasn’t me. No. Not anymore.

  Now, there was barely time for rawness. No time for those carefree scenes which characterise youth.

  I found myself leaning heavily on the vanity, studying my ageing face in the mirror. Every grey hair on my head. Every line of my thirty-one years. And how many would I have left? Sixty? At the outside, if I’m lucky. And then… nothing left but the big sleep, the ultimate darkness, consciousness scattering, flitting away like electricity fleeing a severed cable. I rinsed my face in the washbasin, patted dry, and ran my fingers through my hair. I straightened my tie.

  This life. This silly, short life.

  I stretched, slipping out of the lavatory and through the crowd. Straight into the waiting clutches of my lioness.

  4. Intimate

  I could see her sleeping form silhouetted against the morning light filtering through the hotel curtains. That form, wrapped in a thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheet. The plateau of her shoulder overlooking that long, slender neck. The softly inhaling, exhaling valley of her tiny waist abruptly growing into a mountain of hip
. A ridge of long legs running the length of the king-size bed. In dawn’s pale light, one would not even notice the ravages of time, could not even tell that the poor creature was so old, that she was well past the halfway point of her life.

  She snored, and as she did I was already stealing my arm away from beneath her head. I gently rolled to the edge of the bed, allowing my feet to nestle quietly into the high-pile rug. Sitting, I reached down to gather up my clothes and belongings which I had cleverly thought ahead to fold and store in a neat little pile.

  The beast didn’t even stir. Tiptoeing across the room, I snuck one final glance back before cracking the door and slinking nearly naked out into the hallway. There, I quickly slipped on my clothes and made for the elevator where I straightened up in the mirror.

  I was purposely striding across the lobby, and nearly to the front doors and the anonymous safety of the bustling morning street, when I heard behind me, “Sir! You, sir! Hold on one moment, please, sir!”

  Looking back, I found the desk clerk making a beeline for me with a piece of paper fluttering in hand.

  “Sworn on the bell?” he asked, half in irritation, half in confusion.

  I chuckled. “Benson Rothwell,” I replied, amused.

  The clerk looked startled. “Oh! So, you are the one,” he snapped accusingly. “I have had to read this silliness to at least half a dozen people already this morning! The looks I have been getting — you would not believe!”

  “Sorry,” I said, “I—”

  “Never mind. Here.” And with that, he pulled a small envelope from his vest pocket, thrust it toward me, and turned on his heel. He stormed away to the take his place back behind the great mahogany desk.

  I squinted, and made my way out into the morning sun. Found a spot on a bench, and tore open the envelope to examine its contents. Inside, a note:

  Go find a Dr. Prescott Taylor Harrison in Namibia. He seeks the same thing we do.

  Taking a lighter from my pocket, I set the note aflame and let it drop between my knees to the pavement below. Protocol. I watched it burn away to carbon and blow away in the light breeze. I couldn’t help but to ponder my own life, drawing some important parallels. Then, I pulled out my mobile, and sent a text message to headquarters acknowledging receipt of the memo.

  Taking off into the air later that evening, there was a nostalgic searching of city lights, the same lights which had called to me in youth, and those same lights with which I’d since grown disenchanted. These cities, monuments to the ignorance of mankind. These hives. When would I find the answers to my questions? Had I yet? Was this it? If this was success, then success had come to be measured out in the tiny bottles of vodka handed out in first class by inappropriately dressed Eurotrash airline stewardesses. And I can honestly say that I had reached a point during that flight where I didn’t mind one bit.

  5. Senescence

  They’ll say that no-one can say for sure, that no-one has ever come back to report. Yes, they’ll say that no one can testify with any certainty what it is like to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Well, then they simply haven’t talked to Dr P.T. Harrison.

  The decision to fly to Namibia to visit the good doctor was solely mine to make, but given the immense weight of my ever-present deadline, I really didn’t feel like I had a choice. It was easy to take that flight when I realised just how little I knew about what took place at the point at which life ceased, and what took place afterwards. Answers I thought I might find in Dr. Harrison’s clinic.

  Awful buzzing fluorescent lights, with sickly, peeling, green paint. Pus coloured floor tile, streaked in aged blood. The stark stench of decay and chemicals. This was where the dead came. This was where the dead waited.

  There was no one to receive me, the doctor later explaining that he was “without a secretary at the moment,” so the tatty leather chair sat unoccupied behind the rotting wooden desk beneath a layer of yellowing papers. The first secretary, Kali, had quit four years ago, and her replacement, Rahima, had died of malaria, while Rahima’s successor, Haifa, was kidnapped by rebel forces, never to be heard from again.

  “It’s just the way of things in this place.”

  The old doctor told me all of this before explaining that he had simply run out of applicants, and so decided he might just keep the job indefinitely open, taking care of things himself. Besides, he said, how hard is it to answer a phone? How tough to accept the occasional visitor? How difficult to look after the dead?

  ○

  “So, you suppose me to be a man of feeble mind, do you?” the old doctor croaked.

  “No, I— I—”

  “Well, I can assure you, young man, that this here brain is still in tiptop shape.” He rapped on his balding, white-haired head with the handle of a large, gleaming bone saw. “Ticks along like a finely crafted clock, it does.”

  “Listen, I never meant to imply—”

  “No matter,” the doctor bristled. “I know how you youngsters are. I, too, was young once. Thought I knew everything then. And passion? Oh, I still remember that unmistakable fire of youth. You’re on top of the world when you’re in your twenties. You’re ageless. All-knowing. Passionate. But it is funny how the older you get the more you realise just how little you know. Each year that passes reveals yet another layer of perplexities until you reach my age and find that you really know nothing at all.” He scratched at his scruff of white beard. Mopped at his moist brow with a stained, white-clad sleeve. “In fact, I suspect that on one’s deathbed, the universal final thought must be: That’s it?”

  I laughed despite myself, and the old doctor caught me with a cold grey eye that knotted my stomach.

  “Oh, I don’t mean to be funny. It’s all fairly standard, really. We spend our teens in rebellion. Our twenties knowing everything. Our thirties finding out who we are. Our forties becoming comfortable with what we’ve become. Need I go on?”

  “Well—”

  “Oh, that’s right — I don’t need to tell you any of this. I forget; I, too, was young once. I didn’t care to hear it then, and I know you don’t care to hear it now.”

  “Dr. Harrison, sir, listen,” I said, “I think we’ve gone and got off to a bad start. Might we start over?” With that, I held out my hand. “Benson Rothwell, sir. I’m very pleased to meet you. I’ve read all of your papers. In fact, you’re something of a role model to me.”

  The doctor shifted the large saw to his left hand, and extended his right, firmly clutching my hand in his own, shaking it. “Dr. Prescott Taylor Harrison,” he smiled. “Pleased to meet you, as well. Thank you for the kind words.”

  I smiled and motioned down the stark white corridor. “Shall we carry on then? I know you must be in a hurry.”

  “I don’t hurry, Mr. Rothwell.”

  “Benson, please.”

  “See, I don’t hurry because I like to do my job properly. And, Mr. Rothwell, I don’t hurry because my clients are not in a hurry.”

  6. Oscillation

  We continued walking down the hall, this ancient doctor and I. The man I’d read all about in all the journals. This giant in his field. This legend. So long as I didn’t actually look at him, I could still picture him that way, but the illusion was dashed the second my eyes set upon him. His antediluvian, hunched frame. His wild, thinning, white hair. That soiled lab coat. Could this truly be the Dr. Harrison of such renown? The man whose policies had brought the population of this tiny African nation back from the brink of certain extinction. The Nobel Prize winner? The man who had graced the cover of Time magazine not once, but twice?

  He was going on and on about the pristine state of his mind. And ticking. And clocks.

  “Mr. Rothwell, do you know how a clock is able to keep time?”

  “Really, I’m fine with Benson—”

  “A modern clock is able to keep time with the help of a harmonic oscillator, an object which oscillates repetitively at a constant, precise,
frequency.” Dr. Harrison demonstrated, rhythmically snapping his fingers. “Depending on the type of clock, this might be a pendulum, a tuning fork, perhaps a quartz crystal, or even electrons in an atomic clock.”

  I didn’t even know where the old codger was going with this train of thought. I just wanted to get on to the reason I was there.

  “So long as the harmonic oscillator keeps, erm, oscillating, the clock keeps ticking away. Do you follow?”

  “Yes,” I shrugged, “but I think I’m having a hard time figuring out how this has to do with why I’m here.”

  “I’m getting to that,” the old man sighed. “Now listen. See, we know that as the human brain ages, calcite microcrystals form in the pineal gland within the brain. And we also know that crystals vibrate, or oscillate, which is how they’re able to be used in clocks for keeping time. Now, in a clock, what do you suppose happens if the vibration of the quartz crystal is somehow interrupted?”

  “The clock stops? Or, perhaps if the vibration is altered, it goes out of time?”

  “Very good, Mr. Rothwell. Now, what do you suppose happens if the vibrations of the calcite microcrystals within the pineal gland are interrupted or altered?”

  “Well, that’s something that I really couldn’t be sure about. Am I to assume that the pineal gland or the brain could stop working?”

  “Possibly. Now, what if the vibration of these microcrystals was somehow altered, say, sped up?”

  “Listen, this is all really outside of my expertise. I’m just not sure—”

  “That’s quite all right, Mr. Rothwell; it’s outside of mine, as well. But we can hypothesise, right?” He stopped at a decrepit wooden door. “What if we were to suppose that this is how they manage to cheat death?”

  “They?”

  “What if, Mr. Rothwell, they were somehow able to trigger an alteration in the vibrations of the pineal gland’s calcite microcrystals forcing a sort of deceleration or even complete termination of the ageing process?”