Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction

by Maria Grazia Cavicchioli

  He screamed again and this time managed a grunt, phlegmy and shallow, but a sound. Sound, yes, sound was good. Pain was pain, everywhere and all over, from his teeth to his bum to his toes, but sound meant he was alive.

  Sound could not penetrate the dark, but the dark was his own doing and Alton opened his eyes. The world was a blur of gray and black lit by a feeble light somewhere overhead. He struggled to stand and bumped his head on a low beam that hadn’t been there when he lay down, a faerie trick he was certain.

  Going forward on hands and pin-sore knees, Alton crawled through medicine ball sized wads of paper and massive plastic buckets until he passed under a thick curtain into a larger space. A cave? A hall? His eyes were weak and his swollen fingers lacked sensation that was not pain.

  He hobbled in shadows, twisted with loathing, calling out, “I’ll find you! You can’t hide forever, you wretched imps!”, and hearing only coughs and harrumphs and throaty squeals.

  Alton staggered around the cavernous expanse, tumbling over stacks of this and piles of that, not quite able to make it to the top of a curtained cliff. For those times when the space became too bright and his eyes swelled with miserable tears, Alton floundered about until he found the cubbyhole and dragged himself back inside, covering his shivering form with a plastic tarp like a degenerate on the street. “I hate you. I hate you.” The words were his anchor as he cried himself to sleep.

  Alton sweat pain, a sour mash of spite and bile. It curdled his stomach when he longed for something warm to drink. Day or night? He was never certain. Dark, light, dark. Yes, yes, better in the dark unless it was light and darkness of another sort came to call.

  He needed to escape back to the world he knew. During one safe, comforting dark — yes, yes, dark — as Alton shambled through the larger chamber in search of an exit, a spear of yellow light from the cliff above his cubby struck him full in the face like the fires of Heaven. Cursing and snarling, Alton tottered over to the curtain and pulled himself up as far as he could. Surprise turned to anger when he realized something fleshy held the light and kept moving it out of reach. Alton pinched the massive beast as hard as he could until the light fell away with a clatter and comforting dark returned once more.

  From outside the chamber came the thunder of giant feet taking massive steps. Alton dropped down the side of the cliff and squirmed into his cubby, putting his back to the far wall and covering himself with the tarp. The steps came nearer and a sheet of light crossed over the curtain but did not penetrate. The ceiling creaked as whatever lurked at the top of the cliff shifted; voices rumbled low and threatening. Blind men mumbling prayers, lifting cheeks on the pew. Alton listened and fingered the bits of hate rattling about in his stone shoes.

  ...and he lived happily ever after.

  Sandra M. Odell is a happily married mother of two boys with special needs, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She enjoys asking disturbing questions and capturing people’s uncomfortable answers on the page. Her writing credits include publication in Jim Baen’s Universe, audio production in The Drabblecast, and four honorable mentions from the L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest. She is a Clarion 2010 graduate, and associate member of the SFWA.

  The Closet

  by Norman L. Rubenstein & Carol Weekes

  A closet had always been a place of punishment for him.

  In their former house, Mark’s father would lock him inside his bedroom closet for hours, denying him food, water, and the ability to relieve himself while warning his son that, should he do anything wrong — such as soil himself — more severe repercussions would follow. And now at their new location, a 200-year-old, three-story house made of stone, wood, and leaded windows, with too many closets, twisting corridors, antechambers, oaken wardrobes, and a basement that spanned the entire length and gamut of the house.

  The area is as remote as the house feels; strange, barren, often fog-filled, lined with foreboding woods and narrow, twisting roads. It is in this basement that there waits a door leading somewhere; Mark isn’t certain where except that, since moving here, he has become aware that his father, Donovan Fortune, has snuck downstairs each evening just after 2 A.M., to open this door and walk through. Mark knows because on several of those evenings, he has crept out of bed and, with great trepidation, followed his father into the basement to watch, keeping a safe distance and within shadow.

  His father would stand before the door, partially hidden behind an ancient octopus furnace with extending pipes that fan out and up through floor boards, his face solemn with intent.

  Then, Donovan Fortune would open the damp, cool oaken door, revealing its sooty maw. He would step inside, pulling the door shut behind him. He never returned for at least an hour, and when he did, he would walk past Mark, who concealed himself behind the furnace. His sleepwear would smell of lichen and fungus and his skin would be sooty.

  ○

  A few nights earlier, his father paused in his step and cranked his head around so that he stared directly at the wall of steel and heat behind which his son stood, trembling. His eyes looked deeply troubled. Mark knew that if he was discovered there, the consequences would be horrendous. His father moved close to the furnace, one hand extended outward, the fingers splayed and nails dark with something sooty… the fingers sought and clamped onto the edge of a pipe inches from where Mark stood shrunken against a stone wall. It remained like that for a long moment; boy not daring to release his breath, father’s inhalation whistling in one nostril, and then his father had stepped back.

  He’d peered at an old cistern with interest, then ascended the basement stairwell, shutting off the light switch and unknowingly hurling the boy into darkness. Mark had eaten the scream that was waiting to burst out. He’d brave the dark, waiting for minutes to pass while he’d listened to his father’s footsteps return to the bedroom; the gentle pad of bare feet across floorboards, the soft sigh of a door opening and shutting, the squeak of mattress springs.

  The sound of his mother crying too often, always soft and muffled, and then nothing but the quiet ticking of a house settling into the cooler hours of the night. Only then did Mark dare feel his way through the dim to where he knew the stairwell waited that led into the tiled pall of the kitchen. He wanted to open the strange door in the basement — wanted… no, needed to know what drew his father to this spot every night. And then it occurred to Mark that the best time to investigate the basement closet would be during the daylight hours when his father was away at work.

  That day was a Tuesday and his father, powerful CEO of an engineering conglomerate, had left the house early to fulfill some contractual obligation. Donovan Fortune’s waxed, gleaming BMW retracted itself from the maw of a garage doorway before turning towards a fog bank moving in from the nearby river and disappearing along the heavily-treed Algonquian Road.

  Mark’s mother had gone visiting relatives and the house had fallen as quiet as a winter’s night. Usually, she took her son. This time his father implored that she not not take him. Time for you to grow up and stop being such a baby.

  Their household also consisted of a cook, a woman of Haitian descent whose name was Beulah. Even with Beulah around, the house felt immense, infinite; so many places twisting off into blocks of shadow and weighted silence. They owned no pets. He had no siblings. He was lonely and bored. No small wonder this door in the basement beckoned, particularly since something about whatever lies beyond that door’s entrance had intrigued his father.

  ○

  He stood in the basement, the area disconcerting, but not quite as terrifying in the daylight hours, staring at the door in question. It wasn’t a high door, not like most of the others in the house. He hoped it wasn’t a closet. If this was a closet of some sort, it was unlike the others in the house; most of which sat quietly like Egyptian tombs, their innards filled with the garments and frivolities of his parents’ lives. It would not likely be comparable to the kitchen pant
ry with its shelves than spanned the scope from floor to ceiling and whose stock consisted of spices and pickled things, dried salted meats and goods with which the cook prepared their meals; nor was it apt to be like the place for linens with its faint aromas of lavender water and a small window that allowed illumination to highlight dust floating through its insides.

  He knew; he’d been inside them all, with hours to study their details. Just a little after ten, the cook had cleaned away all remnants of breakfast. He thought of his mother leaving, teary, but explaining to him that ‘adult matters’ pressed and that she’d be back soon enough, leaving him in the care of Beulah. He missed her and wished she’d come home.

  “Don’t go,” he’d said. His father had given him a severe stare, an expression that said ‘Are you still a little boy? Would you like some time in a closet?’ Mark had not uttered another word. He lived in terror of his father’s temper and punishments. He’d been asleep when Mother had left.

  “You done listen boy, and don’t wander off in this big, old house where I can’t find you,” Beulah said, feigning sternness but her kohl eyes twinkling. “You stay where I can keep an eye on you.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Mark had answered. He’d been raised with manners; drilled with propriety. Mark had trouble understanding what might cause his father’s sudden and vicious white-hot temper and land him, trembling and petrified, in a closet. He controlled everything in his life. He understood all too well that bringing home a bad report card, or breaking something, or lying to his father, or unquestioning disobedience to any of his “requests” would precipitate the terrible journey into darkness.

  Recently, Mark had been closet-punished, among other humilities, for failing to enroll in the local little league — despite the fact that he had neither any interest in nor aptitude for the sport. Indeed, Donovan Fortune had once forced his then ten-year-old son to endure twelve hours in a closet with neither food nor water for having struck out in the final inning of a game with the potential tying and winning runs on base. Mark had also faced similar treatment for reading the wrong kinds of books, for reading at all, or sometimes for simply drawing attention from his father while he might be enraged about something else. All Mark knew was that his father found him to be a huge disappointment.

  He’d overheard his father screaming at his mother on numerous occasions, “Mark is a little sissy fairy and it is your fault. The boy takes after your side of the family — he’s just like your brother, a little cry-baby queer. You encourage him, with reading, taking him to the ballet and theater, against my explicit instructions to you. Women’s things. I won’t have it, Evelyn!”

  No matter the type of enclosure, closet-punishment was always dark, stuffy, and crowded once that door was shut and bolted from the other side. He’d spent far too many hours trying to make himself comfortable over tops of shoes, handbags, the waft of stale perfume or the reek of fear and perspiration as he’d wonder, “How long this time?”

  Time lost its essence — seconds would turn into minutes, minutes into hours, and hours into days. Thirst would claw at his throat. He’d beg for a drink and then, if that should on occasion be abated, his bowels and urinary tract would be denied.

  It was always a game with his father; in order for his son to obtain one thing while restrained, he must forfeit another. The idea that his father might have his own closet… what might be in such a place, especially for a man of precision, exactitude, and with a disposition so calculating that his shrewdness had earned him hundreds of thousands of dollars while he’d withhold a glass of water — or the relief of a lavatory — from his pre-adolescent son; what would be in such a place?

  “Something,” Mark whispered, standing before the door; “something much like him.” Yes. Something sinister.

  “You’re never to go into the basement” he’d commented when Mark had dared to ask ‘why.’ “Is that perfectly understood? It is out of bounds.”

  “Yes sir,” Mark had responded like an automaton. Always best to agree. Even better to know what might await him in the basement, lest he be locked in there one of these days.

  Perhaps his father was checking out a new punishment spot for him. Not that Mother ever defied his father. Sometimes, the two of them had been locked away in different locations of a house, aware of each others’ discontent but unable to help one another. Mother and son, bound by blood and marriage; bound by the impenetrable will of Donovan Fortune.

  ○

  The furnace hummed, issuing steam along its pipes. Close by, a covered cistern formed a deep purple disk. Beulah was occupied with lunch preparations. He stepped forward and gripped the handle. It was cool, dusty, and something fibrous clung to his hand. He felt something light and fast scuttle over his fingers and he bit his tongue to restrain a scream. He clicked on a small flashlight in time to see a spider, thick with legs furry as pipe-cleaners, dart into a crack in the door frame.

  He wasn’t a fan of spiders, but he’d been aware of them in other closets and had learned to bite back his screams after one ugly incident several years earlier. Once again, with feeling; he yanked and the door popped open with a quiet sound, like a tongue clucking against the roof of the mouth. Air greeted him, rank with mildew. He listened, straining; a metronomic drip of water from a distance; condensation perhaps, or a ground leak. How deep did this area penetrate? He shook, forcing the flashlight beam as far ahead of himself as he could, stepping inside the lip of the door, leaving it wide open behind him. It occurred to him that, should something happen in here — a fall into an unseen pool of depthless water, a detour off into a directionless maze without light — Beulah would not realize where he’d gone. She’d search the rest of the house, the outer grounds, the town itself, calling his name, frantic. Then, terrified of being blamed as an incompetent sitter, she’d call his father.

  Mr. Fortune, Sir, I can’t find him. I’ve looked everywhere…

  Oppressive darkness felt alive and menacing, luring him despite the potential of risk. He continued walking, his free hand reaching out for the familiar feel of walls close by. At first, his hand slid along wood paneling and objects of varying textures… what felt like silken scarves in one instant and heavy jute bags in another. He paused, glancing behind at the small, pale square of light that was the basement. It occurred to him that, if that door should slam shut, he’d lose all sense of direction in here. Then, unexpectedly, the limits of the closet’s walls fell away and he blundered blindly into open space.

  “Just a little further,” he whispered, encouraging himself. He had to know where this led to. He pushed on, at times feeling a kiss of warm air sometimes redolent of wildflowers, at other times a breeze cool and watery. He soon realized that he was lost and unable to find his way out of his own basement chamber. He did his best to avoid panicking and blindly running in various directions. He sat down upon the slimy stone floor, telling himself that he must think what his father would do if faced with these circumstances, reminding himself that his father had come in here often and had returned, unscathed.

  “I’m in our house, our basement. There’s nothing to be afraid of, and even if I can’t find my way out, Beulah will realize that I’m missing and will come looking for me.” His voice disappeared into vastness. The idea that his father would realize he was here and lock the door from the other side, sealing him in for hours, terrified him.

  Before he could think further about formulating any plan, he heard a sliding sound followed by a guttural cry that froze the blood in his veins. His self-confidence broke. It hadn’t been human, nor had it sounded animal or mechanical. He couldn’t pinpoint a possible origin of the cry. He ran, headlong into the dark. His foot struck something, tripping him. He fell forward to land hard. His flashlight flew from his hand, followed by the tinkling sound of broken glass. Something waited in the murk around him.

  A stink of fuel, metal, and rubber came to him, followed by the soft click of a door opening close by, then shutting aga
in. Footsteps moved along dank ground towards him. Mark saw something blink on in the gloom. Automotive tail lights formed grotesque cerise exclamation points but failed to light up anything beyond. He noted the license plate and recognized the letters and numerals of his father’s vehicle. How? He tried to make sense of what had transpired since he’d first entered the basement door. He recalled one of his favorite shows; Doctor Who, the TARDIS, and a space that was somehow substantially bigger on the inside than on the outside. However, this was no television show or some sort of trick photography. He was in a basement room of some sort, though somehow unaccountably vast and with no evidence of any walls or ceiling discernible, with a stalled vehicle, its brake lights the only tangible thing within darkness.

  A small flash of light to his left and his father’s sallow face floated into the dim. His father’s eyes briefly widened in shocked surprise at the sight of him, and then even more quickly narrowed into a glare that burned laser-like. Donovan Fortune’s mouth pulled into the sneering half-smile/half grimace that his young son had become all too familiar with- the face that always preceded a particularly bad beating and an invariable trip to a closet.

  “Just what the living hell do you think you are doing out of the house this late after your bed time? How dare you violate your curfew? Explain yourself, young man, and be quick about it!”

  Words evaded Mark, the shock too great. Moments ago, it had been only morning; now it was night; equally, moments ago his father had been at work; now he was here with him. The unreality of a nightmare formed a noose about him, making him hyperventilate. He felt his bladder give out. As for a car being in here, nothing made sense. Possibly another doorway existed within the dark, an opening into the night and street beyond.