Hello Darkness

by Sam Best

  No one was there.

  The forest went silent. The breeze stopped. The only sound Karen Raines heard was the thunderous beating of her own heart. She took one step forward and realized too late that it was a mistake. She could feel Foster’s body fill the air behind her as he stepped from around the tree. The cold barrel of his revolver slowly parted the tightly-wound bun of black hair on the back of her head and pressed into her skull.

  Click.

  Foster laughed.

  Raines spun on him and swatted the gun away. “God damn it, Foster! Why do you always pull the trigger?! It’s a game but it’s not Russian Roulette!” Blood rushed to her cheeks and she knew the look on her face conveyed boiling anger that she rarely allowed to surface.

  Deputy Foster smiled a cocky half-grin as he holstered his standard-issue .38. “Looks like the first round of drinks is on you, Raines.” The one and only thing Foster had going for him was a slight backwater charm that grew on women over time. As big of a misogynistic asshole as her fellow deputy was, Raines still found him mildly attractive on occasion—which irritated her even more. She sighed and holstered her weapon.

  “Just don’t pull the trigger, Walt. Okay?”

  He chuckled and rubbed his hands together. The sun was setting quickly and the temperature was dropping. After nightfall it would be twenty degrees outside.

  Larry and Frank met them at the top of the rain-washed scar.

  “That was one of the better ones, I think,” said Larry as he pulled a twig out of his shoulder-length brown hair. He always liked to play one of the criminals in the deputies’ frequent game of cat-and-mouse and he let his hair hang loose to add to the shaggy appearance of his violent alter-ego.

  “Sorry, Raines,” said Frank as he walked over to her. “I know how much you wanted to win the last game of the season.”

  “It’s okay. At least you two won’t have to listen to Foster gloat for the next two months.”

  Foster shrugged. “All part of the victory package.” He winked at Raines.

  “Get over yourself.”

  “After a few drinks, maybe,” he said. “I thought you almost had me once or twice.”

  “That’s because we did.”

  Foster grinned his half-grin. The four deputies started the long climb up the mountain.

  “I’m really going to miss it here,” said Frank. He had taken to the small town much more than Larry. Karen often caught him looking at the distant mountains with a faint smile on his lips.

  “It’s gonna be so boring,” said Foster.

  “You should come back with us to Denver,” said Larry. “Could always use a guy like you out that way.”

  “Yeah, but you guys aren’t even in the city. Not downtown, anyway.”

  “Well, you say tomato, I say what’s the difference? It’s a short enough drive.”

  Foster shook his head. “I want the big city.”

  “You gotta be a city cop for that,” said Frank. “Trust me, they’re backed up with applications for years.”

  “You guys could put in a good word for me,” said Foster.

  “You know we don’t have that kind of pull,” said Larry. “Us country boys don’t mix too well with city cops.”

  Karen hopped over the fallen trunk of a rotting tree. “Why don’t you two put in for transfer out this way? Keep us company.”

  “Hell,” said Foster. “If we had the budget to hire them I’d be at home sleeping right now and someone else would be out here playin’ in the woods.”

  “Like it isn’t your favorite part of the job,” said Karen.

  “It’s over now, ain’t it? Once these two yahoos go home it’s back to just you and me, Raines.”

  Larry slapped Foster on the back. “I thought you liked it that way, cowboy.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “Things are gettin’ a little cold around here, if you take my meaning.”

  Karen smiled and shook her head.

  “Speakin’ of which,” said Frank. “Does it feel a little warm to anyone else?”

  Karen noticed the sweat that still beaded on her forehead. “Now that you mention it…”

  “Little warm front never hurt anybody,” said Foster. “Especially this close to Christmas. When it cools down, though, Raines, you know I’ll warm you right up.” He winked at her and she shook her head yet again.

  “Foster,” she said, “keep dreaming.”

  3

  Annabelle was quiet for the rest of the drive.

  She sat in the passenger seat with her left arm folded around Mr. Hops, an oversized, floppy-eared stuffed rabbit that her mother had given her on her first birthday, and her right arm propped against the door at her elbow. Her right hand mushed her cheek to the side as she watched the scenery drift past. A half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich Ben had bought her at the gas station rested in her lap.

  He did all he could to assuage Annabelle’s melancholy after the death of the huge owl. He put banana slices in her sandwich—usually a sure-fire remedy for sadness—but she didn’t seem to notice; she chewed mechanically as she looked into the distance. Her tears eventually stopped and only her silence and the occasional sniffle remained. They played no music for the last twenty minutes of the trip.

  Falling Rock was exactly as Ben remembered.

  They had to take Main Street for a short ways before finding the turnoff onto Dawn Avenue. Almost all of the stores that had been open for business when Ben was a child were still up and running upon his return, even if though had closed up for the night. Annabelle kept her face pressed to the glass of her window and watched the small city pass by. Ben recognized the Sheriff’s Office and Hank Buckley’s hardware store, and could see the fluorescent glow of the gas station ahead at the end of Main Street. Only a few people roamed the sidewalks. Once the temperature dropped for the winter season, most residents would spend fifteen hours a day or more indoors.

  Ben reached the three-way intersection of Dawn Avenue, Cedar Street, and Main Street, and turned left onto Dawn, away from the peak of Mt. Hodges. He had scaled that mountain so many times as a youth that he was sure he knew the way blindfolded. The year after graduating high school he broke the record for fastest round-trip sprint to the peak and back, running his ass off straight up to the top and all the way down again. Walt Foster broke that record the next year, and for all Ben knew Walt’s claim was still unchallenged to that day.

  He turned the Cherokee onto a long dirt driveway off Dawn Avenue and descended farther down into the valley, away from Falling Rock. There were only two residences in the valley and the second of them belonged to the pastor of the church. City council members long ago passed a law stating that no more of the valley’s lush woodlands could fall to the axe for a hundred years. When that century was up, whoever sat on the city council would most likely extend that restriction for another hundred years.

  What that meant for Ben as a child was miles of untouched wilderness in which to lose the thoughts of everyday life and in which to find his imagination. He smiled as a plethora of old memories swept over him. He looked over at Annabelle. She was sitting upright in her seat, trying and failing to hide her excitement as they approached their destination.

  The sun had almost set behind the mountains and a bright orange glow lit up the valley as if a thousand people were standing on the mountainsides reflecting the last rays of daylight with a thousand golden discs. Bright shafts of light pierced through the thick canopy above as the Cherokee moved slowly over the rain-washed road. Large rocks had been exposed after years without anyone around to dump fresh dirt on the path.

  “Are we lost?” asked Anna, her normally high-pitched voice rising even higher with genuine concern.

  “No, sweetie,” said Ben. “It’s just up here around this corner.”

  She leaned forward against her seat belt and strained to see the road ahead. Ben turned the headlights on to combat the encroaching night. He swung the Cherokee wide around a slow bend in the road
and the lights fell upon an old two-story house that stood alone in the woods.

  The white outer walls were grimed with years of dirt and green mold. The wood planks of the wraparound deck were faded grey from weather exposure and had collapsed in multiple places, forming treacherous pits of jagged splinters. Gutters were blocked, the roof was covered with large branches, and two glass panes of the front door’s four-paned window design were broken; their occluded shards lay scattered across the porch.

  Ben pulled the Cherokee to a stop in front of the house and left the headlights on as he got out. Annabelle quickly unfastened her seat belt and hopped down from the passenger’s seat. She trotted over to Ben and stood next to his leg while she looked up at the looming house.

  “You lived here?” she asked, her mouth agape as she craned her neck to look at the roof.

  “Sure did. When I was your age.”

  “My age?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “It’s scary.”

  Ben looked at the house. The headlights shone on their backs and cast sinister shadows across the deck and front door. Above, a dense canopy of thick branches subdued the ambient light from the setting sun and plunged the small clearing, at the center of which sat Ben’s childhood home, into a sullen gloom. Two wide windows, one on each side of the front door, gave the appearance of open eyes staring back at them.

  “We just need to get the lights turned on, that’s all. Okay?”

  She nodded and reached up to hold his hand. Her other arm still hugged Mr. Hops tightly to her chest.

  Ben hoped that there was power running to the house. He knew it would have been disconnected years ago. He had wanted to get into town earlier so that he could visit the Utilities Office before they closed and get the juice running back into the old home, but the fiasco with the owl on the highway had knocked a good chunk of time off his schedule. He didn’t have a portable generator with him and would have to rely on his father’s ancient one behind the house; a machine that hadn’t been operated in more than a decade. The temperature outside wasn’t dropping too quickly, but it would be pitch black soon and they would need shelter before long. The only option besides sleeping in the house was sleeping in the Cherokee, which was packed to the brim with their belongings. The last thing Ben wanted to do was haul everything into the house that night so he and Annabelle could lay on the hard seats of his Jeep.

  The three stairs leading onto the broad porch creaked loudly as Ben held his daughter’s hand and walked to the front door. There was a black hole in the deck a few feet to the left of the door and Ben made sure to keep Annabelle well clear of the opening. He began making mental notes of everything he was going to have to do to get the old house into respectable shape. A cursory glance of the siding revealed only a few minor damaged areas—aesthetic at worst. Part of the reason he had wanted to move back to Falling Rock in the first place was to give himself a project that would force him to spend long hours not thinking about Marissa. From the looks of his old ramshackle home, his plan was far more successful than he had originally intended.

  The interior would be no less of a time-waster.

  After unlocking both deadbolts and the smaller handle lock, Ben pushed open the front door and walked into the house. There was a light switch immediately to the right of the door, but flipping it rapidly up and down several times did nothing. A dim light glowed through the uncurtained windows in the main sitting room and provided enough illumination by which to navigate. Ben and Annabelle walked around a large couch covered with white sheets and past a low coffee table caked in dust. An old grandfather clock sat in one corner, cloaked in a faded white blanket like a tall rectangular ghost.

  The sitting room led into the kitchen, which Ben remembered as open and airy in the summertime. A window was set into the wall above the two-tub sink and looked out over an overgrown garden. For the briefest of moments Ben saw his mother standing over the sink peeling turnips in the afternoon sunlight. The flash of memory struck him like a soft bolt of lightning—she turned, smiled, and was gone.

  Alongside a row of pots and pans, old knives hung from a magnetic strip suspended over the square, tiled island in the center of the kitchen. Ben made his way past and rubbed Annabelle’s head comfortingly as she clung to the side of his leg.

  “I know it’s around here somewhere, Belle,” he said, searching the walls of the kitchen.

  He swung open a thin wooden door next to the silent refrigerator and waited for his eyes to adjust to the shadow within. Three wooden shelves, almost empty, were tacked to the back wall of the old cupboard. Where once rested countless jars of preserves and stacks of saltine crackers now sat a handful of faded, expired canned goods.

  Ben felt around the cupboard wall next to the door and found what he was looking for. He pried open the fuse-box cover and flipped over every switch. Loud clicks echoed throughout the house, but no lights came on.

  He sighed. “Well, looks like we’re going back outside.”

  * * *

  Ben siphoned a gallon of gas from the Cherokee and carefully fed it into the rusty square machine tucked away next to the water heater behind the house. The primer button emitted noises like the wheezing breaths of a dying old man whenever Ben depressed the small rubber dome. He had to press constantly for five minutes before the primer held a charge.

  The first few times he yanked out the cord that started the generator yielded little more than a loud, cranky chug and a puff of rusty air. The machine loosened up after each attempt until at last it shook violently from side to side for what seemed like an eternity and the motor caught and finally held. The generator sputtered while it choked out its remaining years of dust and eventually settled into a nice, rhythmic wumwumwumwum before Ben felt comfortable enough to walk away.

  Half the lights in the house had not yet burned out, so he and Annabelle were still able to see what they were doing. They grabbed their sleeping bags, a lamp, and a Zippy book from the Cherokee and headed upstairs to find a room in which to camp out for the evening.

  There were two bedrooms upstairs: the master, which had been where Ben’s parents slept, and Ben’s room. After Annabelle saw her dad’s room, nothing he said could stop her from wanting them both to sleep on his small childhood bed, regardless of the more spacious queen-sized mattress right down the hall.

  He unrolled their sleeping bags side by side on the bed and plugged the lamp into a wall socket nearby. Ben pulled off the lampshade to provide better illumination while Annabelle tucked herself down into her sleeping bag.

  “It’s gonna be cold tonight,” said Ben. “I’m gonna grab us some blankets. I’ll be just around the corner.”

  He handed Anna her book and walked out of the room.

  Decades-old pictures still adorned the upstairs hallway. Ben saw class photos ranging from preschool to his senior year in high school. Interspersed throughout were pictures of his parents when they were younger; wedding photos, vacation memories, and more. They were all coated with a thick layer of dust.

  His parents’ old room was at the end of the hallway. The door was ajar and when Ben pushed it all the way open he stopped.

  His dead wife sat on the bed and stared at the wall.

  She looked even better than he remembered. She had always been beautiful—a compliment she brushed aside whenever he spoke it—but there on the bed she emitted a radiance that was nothing less than mesmerizing. She turned her head to look at him and when her eyes met his he was suddenly on the beach. Marissa stood next to him in her wedding dress, the ribbon in her hair whipping softly in the strong breeze. She laughed and he was back in his parents’ old bedroom.

  It wasn’t the first time he had seen the phantom of Marissa and Ben knew better than to think it would be the last. She sat on the bed and stared at him. He closed his eyes and shook his head to clear her away, thinking that it was some sort of flashback like seeing his mother earlier in the kitchen.

  She was still there when he opened his eyes.


  “Marissa?” he said.

  Annabelle’s voice came down the hallway from his old room. “Daddy? Was that you?”

  Ben turned to call back. “Yes, sweetie. Just me.” When he looked at the bed again, his wife was gone. Ben slapped his face and rubbed his eyes. “Damn sleep,” he said to himself and yawned, running some quick numbers in his head and realizing he had been awake for almost thirty hours. In his rush to get to Falling Rock he had decided not to stop off at a hotel halfway through the trip.

  Ben hurried over to the closet, grabbed three thick quilts from the top shelf, and went back to his daughter, making sure to firmly close the door to his parents’ room behind him.

  * * *

  Ben opened his eyes and knew he was stuck in a nightmare.

  He couldn’t feel the cold air, but he saw his breath turn to fog in front of his eyes. His bare feet turned blue as he stood on the ice covering the frozen lake.

  “No,” he said.

  It was a nightmare he had relived many times over.

  He was back in Baltimore. A tree-lined road ran alongside the lake and cars drove past slowly because of the black ice warning.

  Ben tried to run to the road but his feet were frozen to the ice. If he could just get there before—

  His old beige Volvo turned around a bend in the distance and drove next to the lake. Ben was in the driver’s seat and Marissa sat next to him, laughing at something he had said.

  They had left Annabelle at home with a babysitter and drove into town for dinner. Marissa had wanted him to avoid the highway so they could take the longer, more scenic route into town. Their date nights were becoming more and more infrequent so Ben was happy to extend their already short evenings as much as possible.