Hello Darkness

by Sam Best

  They both waited as the phone on the other end rang loudly over her receiver. She let it go ten times before hanging up. “Sorry, sugar.”

  Moses stood there, unable to think clearly. His mind was a jumble of possibilities. Sheriff Mills was the only man in town with the power to get everyone to safety. They simply would not listen to the pastor no matter how loud he shouted the truth. Seeing is believing for most people; Moses accepted that long ago.

  “Thank you, Janet. Will you please do me a favor and have him stop by my church the second he gets back?”

  “You got it.”

  He watched her scribble out a quick note and tape it down to the corner of her desk. “It’ll be the first thing I tell him.”

  Moses swallowed hard and realized how dry his throat had become. He nodded his thanks to Janet and walked out of the building.

  * * *

  The path that led back to The Last Valley Church was a well-worn dirt trail that descended gently as it wound through the thick woods below Falling Rock. The biggest obstacles Moses faced were large rocks jutting up randomly along the path, but he spotted them easily in the bright light of the waxing moon.

  He had always enjoyed walking through the woods alone; there was a peace one could not find anywhere else. The dark did not bother Moses St. Croix; even as a child he was uncannily comfortable whenever the lights went out. He found a certain comfort in being so far removed from civilization. While he enjoyed spreading God’s Word as often as possible, there were times when Moses wondered if he hadn’t been meant for a different, more quiet kind of life.

  The woods around him darkened as he reached the halfway point on the trail. The very last of Main Street’s lights disappeared up on the mountain behind him. He paused for a moment and looked back, second-guessing his decision not to tell anyone up there the truth. Moses had suspected all along that it was foolish to even try to get them to listen, but his conscious would not allow him the luxury of complacence.

  Evil flourishes when good men do nothing.

  Moses considered himself to be a good man—to be among the very best of men. He sacrificed for his flock; all of his earnings went straight back into the church. He volunteered with the homeless and donated food to the shelters. He visited dying sinners at the hospitals in Denver to pray with them for forgiveness. Moses St. Croix had earned the right to be heard.

  And yet they would not listen.

  Looking up to the sky, he saw the thin outline of black smoke pass in front of the moon. His eyes traced the ribbon down to the forest canopy where it disappeared into the trees. A short distance away he saw the steeple of his church; his sanctuary.

  The smoke appeared two days ago, just after a comforting Sunday service during which he spoke about one of his favorite subjects: the resurrection of God’s only Son. It warmed his soul whenever he thought of that uplifting story and he hoped it had the same effect on his parishioners, although he sometimes doubted that his passionate words ever made any kind of lasting impact.

  Moses had been standing at the front doors of the church to say farewell to each of his flock—as he always did after Sunday service—when Murietta Rosenstein, still going strong at age eighty-five, turned around and pointed at the slowly rising black smoke. She made some disparaging comments about the bad habits of local youth before shuffling off to her car.

  The smoke looked strange to Moses, almost as if it were creeping too slowly into the sky. It appeared more solid than normal smoke; he saw no deviant wisps nor thin patches in the long stream of soot-black smog. As he squinted to block out some of the sun’s oppressively bright rays, it looked less like smoke and more like a twisting, rising, black stream of sludge.

  He gave it no more thought that day. There was no telephone at The Last Valley Church, so it was easy for him to mentally pass the responsibility of informing Sheriff Mills or the fire to another citizen. Two days later, when the smoke failed to dissipate and he had still not heard from the sheriff, Moses began to worry. A normal fire would have grown in size, especially after two days surrounded by dry forest.

  And so Moses had decided to investigate the matter himself. If there were teenagers partying at his church’s doorsteps, he knew more than one way to scare them off.

  It had only taken him a few minutes to walk the distance from his church’s front door to the origin of the black smoke. The woods were thickly overgrown for much of the way; no one had been through that part of the forest in a long time and it forced Moses to reconsider the cause of the unnatural smoke. After losing an old game trail which criss-crossed randomly through the valley, he set his bearings by the smoke in the sky and followed it blindly, pushing through bushes and tearing one of his nicer Sunday shirts to ribbons.

  He stepped over a large fallen branch and looked up to discover that he was in a wide clearing. Thick boughs from ancient trees curved inward to form a latticed arboreal dome overhead. The ground was a mottled brown; no living blade of grass grew within the circular field. The sky was scarcely visible through the branches above the clearing, and the whole place glowed with a soft ambient daylight.

  Moses pushed his thin glasses up to the bridge of his nose and stepped slowly into the clearing.

  The air was stifling. The ground shimmered with heat-fog and Moses began to sweat immediately. He forced thick, hot air into his lungs and then back out again as if he were breathing heavy exhaust fumes.

  Black smoke emanated from the middle of the clearing. It snaked upward from a small, charred-black crater in the ground. He walked forward slowly and checked the perimeter of the clearing, still waiting to see signs of teenagers fleeing from their illegal overnight camp site.

  The pit was about five feet wide and just as deep. The walls of the crater were blackened and charred. Shiny black sludge coated the rock-hard soil. It smelled of rotten eggs and rotting meat. Moses was thankful he had not had a chance to eat lunch or else he feared it would have come up right there in that clearing.

  He pressed the back of his wrist up to his nose and leaned forward over the edge of the crater. The spot from which the smoke was pouring glowed red-orange as if searing lava flowed just underground. The light pulsed with heat and belched up the continuous stream of black smoke.

  “Oh my God,” was all he could say.

  Suddenly he was back in Seminary School, a child prodigy of eighteen. Moses had already earned one doctorate from Stanford and was a third of the way through his second when he heard The Calling. Giving up a lucrative future in science and medicine for the pursuit of spiritual welfare made him an instant academic pariah. Young men and women whom he had thought to be his friends—other promising young adults who, like him, had already achieved some level of success in the educated world—shunned him without hesitation. Never before had the division between academia and religion been so visibly outlined to Moses St. Croix.

  It was in his name, for Heaven’s sake. What had his parents been thinking? How can one name their child after one of the great biblical pillars and not expect that person to ask the harder questions in life? Moses had been content to give up his academic future and ask those questions for the rest of his life when, on his first day at Seminary, he was approached by an old man wearing priest’s vestments.

  The man was Bishop Edward Huxberg, a scholar who had published more than thirty essays about spiritual warfare in the modern age; the struggle between good and evil made relevant to modern times. Being a young man with a much more dire view of the world than most would consider healthy, and being so taken with the subject in general, Moses had read every word Huxberg wrote and was therefore extremely flattered when the aging theologian solicited him with the proposition of tutelage.

  It was not uncommon for established clergy to seek out the best and brightest pupils on campus and take them under their wing. In a way it was almost a game: every year a new crop of hopefuls would arrive, and every year men in whose only fresh hope of success lay with new blood would descend upon the most
promising candidates, hoping to guide them toward their own particular areas of expertise. “Spiritual Succession” was a term coined by Huxberg himself, who had always been acutely self-aware of petty social interactions.

  After assuring Moses that his intentions were not academic in nature—and after Moses pushed aside his slightly bruised ego for being considered for something other than his self-called mental prowess—Huxberg went on to explain in great detail how the world was in danger of being consumed by evil at any given moment, and in fact had been in danger for millennia.

  They had been on a bench in the school’s courtyard on a bright summer day when Huxberg explained how close to destruction lay humanity’s future. Moses laughed. When Huxberg stolidly refused to admit that it was a joke, Moses accepted the older man’s offer of mentorship, seeing within his eyes the burning determination of one who truly believes. The distinct lack of insanity was also a requirement for Moses’s acceptance, and he found no trace of mania within Huxberg—simply devout faith.

  Moses’s decision was born more out of a secret desire to learn what caused Huxberg’s beliefs to veer so far from the practiced norm after the authoring of so many traditional, illuminating essays in his earlier years. The man was a gifted author and speaker and his lectures were always well-attended, but lately they were regarded more as entertainment than education.

  Still, Moses was intrigued. And besides, there was no strict rule stating that a student could not have more than one unregistered mentor; Moses could seek proper tutelage from one of the more conventional professors in his spare time.

  There was, however, an unspoken rule of which Moses was completely unaware, and any and all interest in his future by other parties—academic or otherwise—disappeared completely after it became known he had aligned himself with Edward Huxberg’s increasingly paranoid beliefs.

  Moses was able to brush most of his concern away, so filled with confidence in his own abilities as he was.

  What Huxberg would end up revealing to Moses about the underlying fabric of the world would shake the very foundations of reality to which the young man so arrogantly clung.

  The two days following his first visit to the black pit had been the worst of his life. Old warnings from his mentor came flooding back; warnings and instructions he had chosen to ignore for the past fifteen years, dismissing them as nothing more than the inane ramblings of priests and scholars similar to Huxberg who had lost their relevance to modern religion. Since he had first seen the pit, Moses delved into old books he forgot he owned, prying them from underneath a dusty floorboard beneath his small bed in a room attached to the back of his church.

  Crumbling texts brought to light all of the impossible notions his mentor had tried to infect him with. “Fairy tales and hokum”, as he used to say to the old man’s face. Moses shook his head when he remembered; such hubris from one who thought he knew too much.

  The more he read, the more he became certain that the good people of Falling Rock were in danger. There was still a lingering feeling deep within his mind that he might be wrong about everything; enough to acknowledge but not enough to dissuade him from trying to convince Sheriff Mills to evacuate the town.

  There was only one way to be absolutely certain that all of the preparations he had made over the last two days weren’t for naught.

  A fork in the trail lay ahead of him. To the right was a brief run to the front doors of The Last Valley Church. To the left was the black pit. If it had grown in size, his suspicions and those of his mentor before him would be confirmed. It would mean that evil truly had come into this world and had set its sights on Falling Rock.

  Moses turned left at the fork and plunged deeper into the woods.

  6

  Tommy Bridges knew there was a monster under his bed.

  It was getting dark outside and he dreaded nightfall. He was supposed to go to bed early that night because his family was leaving to visit his grandparents in a couple days and Tommy’s dad wanted everyone to “rest up for the journey”. His grandparents lived in Nevada and his dad always liked to wake up unnaturally early for road trips so the family could beat the traffic.

  The curtain over the window next to his bed was printed with planets and rocket-ships. His mother had been trying to switch them out ever since he was twelve years old for something with boring colored stripes but Tommy refused. He liked rocket ships. What was so great about stripes?

  He pulled the curtain aside and looked at the dusky sky.

  Tommy’s parents didn’t believe his story about the monster, but then again he had been known to stretch the truth from time to time. The monster was under there—right under his bed—lurking and drooling, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. Tommy could hear it breathing in the late hours of the night, long after the sun disappeared behind the mountains and before the moon began its long journey across the sky.

  He knew it wasn’t a dog or a cat since they didn’t have either of those. One time the neighbor’s cat, an orange tabby named Rascal, crept into the house while the door was open and hid somewhere inside. It didn’t come out until Tommy and his family went to a restaurant for dinner. They came home to find every floor-level cabinet wide open. Tommy immediately proclaimed the house was haunted and he was a good part of the way to convincing his father (despite his mother’s insistence that the cause was much more natural) when Rascal darted out from under the bookcase and plowed straight into the sliding glass door that led to the back patio. Tommy’s mother opened the door for the disoriented feline and it stumbled off toward the neighbor’s house.

  It wasn’t Tommy’s fault he inherited more of his father’s vivid imagination and less of his mother’s practicality. No—cats and dogs didn’t sleep under his bed and growl at him whenever he awoke with a full bladder in the middle of the night. There was something else under there, Tommy knew. Something evil.

  His mother was starting to become genuinely concerned that Tommy had relapsed to an early childhood state where he wet the bed every other night. It was embarrassing, especially for a thirteen-year-old. If the kids at school ever found out about his problem, they would never let him hear the end of it. Seventh grade was hard enough for a gawky teenager without everyone laughing at him all the time.

  He tried to keep an empty soda bottle next to his bed in which to relieve himself when he felt the need. His mother found the bottle on the second night and took it away, saying he was a grown young man and the time for silliness was long past. They could work out his problem together as a family. Embarrassed again! Since when was peeing his pants a family affair? Tommy longed for the day when he turned eighteen. He and his buddy Mitch from school were going to fix up an old RV (after they stumbled across it abandoned in an unused junkyard) and travel the country, or at least down to Florida.

  “Nothin’ but babes down there, my man,” said Mitch about their future foray to the Sunshine State. “As far as the eye can see.”

  Mitch had developed a strange eye for girls over the summer between the sixth and seventh grades which Tommy hadn’t yet acquired. They were all he talked about anymore and most times Tommy just wanted him to shut up about it. In Mitch’s defense, the girls were getting a lot taller and a lot more…full…in ways that most boys seemed to like.

  There was one girl, though, who Tommy had begun to notice: Amy Cooke, with her long, dark hair and sparkling eyes. Something funny happened in Tommy’s stomach every time he got close to her.

  At first he thought it was cooties, but his mother assured him that those didn’t exist outside of elementary school.

  Tommy had always been a late bloomer. He was the second-shortest kid in his class and he hadn’t started talking until he was almost three except for the rare “da-da” and “ma-ma”. When he did start talking, though, he already had a decent vocabulary and was able to communicate at a fifth-year level. His parents had him examined and the doctors determined that Tommy had been developing language in his own mind the entire
time. One doctor suggested it might be a form of autism, but that opinion was shot down as quickly as all the others and the family settled on the belief that the boy was simply a very good listener.

  The truth was that Tommy was a great deal more intelligent than any boy or girl he had ever met. It was painfully obvious to him, and usually to others after one brief conversation. That’s why his only real friend at school was Mitch. The sandy-haired troublemaker didn’t seem to mind that Tommy was way smarter than everyone else. If someone gave Tommy a hard time Mitch stood up for him.

  Tommy saw nothing wrong with analyzing a situation and learning all you could about it before opening your big fat mouth and saying something stupid. He did this unconsciously as a child, of course, but began to notice the pattern more and more as he grew older. There were never any bike-riding lessons, for example. When it came time for Tommy to learn how to ride a two-wheeler he simply hopped on and pedaled away. His father laughed about it for weeks.

  He did have a weakness, though, and its name was Math.

  Most things coalesced in Tommy’s brain to form structure; decipherable blueprints he could tuck away and call on any time he needed. Math never stuck. No matter how hard he focused, the numbers became jumbled in his brain and were impossible to untangle. It confused the hell out of his parents. He felt extremely silly bringing home a report card filled with six A’s and one C-minus. It bothered Tommy, as well. He talked to his dad about it, who said that intelligence always comes with a fair bit of ego, and Tommy was no exception.

  There was talk of advancing him as many as three grades next year and moving him directly to High School—do not pass Go, do not collect two-hundred dollars. His parents were still trying to work out a way around the math problem. Tommy might have to take every class except math at the high school and get a private tutor on the side.

  He was forced to push his math worries to the back-burner. The only major question occupying Tommy’s mind those days was what could be done to rid himself of the monster.