by Rob Heinze
Those of the Light & Dark
By
Rob Heinze
Copyright © 2012 by Rob Heinze
www.sketchesfromacelestialsea.com
All Rights Reserved.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another reader, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book (not just the sample) and you did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to places, events or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Author’s Note
This is the eleventh novel I have written since I started back in 2002, and the third book in what I think of as my “out-of-the-trunk” novel. This book was written in 2003, when I was twenty-four. This book was the first book that landed me an agent, who sent the manuscript to 6-8 publishers in New York. Most of their comments validated my story-telling and writing ability, but because it was either “too literary or thoughtful” or too “supernatural” or “fantastic”, no one made an offer. I have worked on this book for close to six years, picking at it like a child picks at a food he doesn’t want anymore. While I have a deep love for this book, it caused me great grief and made me question why I bothered to spend so much time laboring in my craft of story-telling.
The book was a culmination of several ideas. One was a dream in which I found myself in a strange, cavernous place that was literally glowing with reddish light. I remember waking from the dream and thinking: I’ve been there before. Years later, while working in Queens, NY (doing environmental testing on government-owned abandoned houses), I was approached by a man who appeared homeless, asking for money, while my nerves were already frayed from the bad neighborhood and boarded up houses. In the same situation as the protagonist in the book, I then found bizarre and unnerving writing on the walls of the house. (Luckily, in real life, the homeless man never came back to the house.) The final piece that came together was a vision of a “white, glowing figure” looking at me from around a building that came to me without pre-mediation. Weird and wild stuff, man…but you know how I roll.
If you like reading this, I can only ask for a favor, okay? Put a good review on whatever site you purchased it on, and check out my other books, all of which have a similar style and subject matter. If I get enough people to read it, maybe the big publishers will make an exception to their publishing menu and put my books out as an appetizer. You can also drop me a line at [email protected].
Now we’re going to go someplace. It’s a strange place where there is no electricity, and night comes with little warning save for the instinctual fear clamoring to the surface of your mind. It feels like life, this “no-world”, but you know it’s wrong. Because of them. Because of the Those of the Light and Those of the Dark. Are they escape and salvation—or will they’ll bring you further down into the deep dark?
You decide…
Rob Heinze
Fiction by Rob Heinze
Novels (ebooks)
The New Law (not published)
Dreamweaver
Dark Wafts
Weeds
Blackwood Barker
Old Dirt Road
Worldwide Answers
The Chaser: Dark Storm 1 (fantasy)
Easterly Retreat
Strange Places
Those of the Light & Dark
Skylights
Glasdel (fantasy)
Lake in the Bad Neighborhood
How a Psychic Vampire Came to Stafford
The Swarm
Short Story Collections
Sketches from a Celestial Sea (Volume 1)
Part One - In Tenebras
1
Charley Allen, twenty-four, stood facing the boarded-up door in a Queens, NY neighborhood. Beyond the boarded-up door was a foreclosed house and in that house would be only darkness and cold. He had a flashlight, but flashlights do not work on the sort of all-encompassing darkness you find within abandoned homes.
“Just get it over with,” he whispered.
Tall and thick-necked, he was still not comfortable in this neighborhood. He fiddled with the master-lock, key inserted, but the rain had rusted the mechanism. He couldn’t get the key to turn. It didn’t help that his hands were trembling; they had gone numb outside of the gloves. Worse, the two-hour drive across Manhattan—and the 20 oz. coffee—had filled his bladder, which was letting him know about it. Empty me, you bastard! How does that feel?! Empty me!
That was when he heard the voice behind him:
“Got a light?”
Charley, startled, dropped the key. It fell to the wet porch. He turned slowly. There was a dilapidated black man with a wild growth of graying beard, standing just beyond the open gate. The gray, misty day framed the sad man in a fitting canvas. There was something Charley sensed about the guy that put his nerves—that sympathetic flight-or-fight response—immediately on guard.
“Nah, sorry. Don’t smoke.”
The black man stood there and looked up at the gray sky, his mouth twitching. He glanced back down to Charley. The guy looked both sad and crazy. He didn’t look like he had been homeless long—maybe a few months—but Charley knew he was homeless. He glanced beyond the man, saw his car parked across the street, and wondered if he could make it there. He didn’t think he could.
“Listen,” the man said, taking a step towards the house. “You have a dollar?”
He stopped, seemed to consider something, and then reached into his pocket. Charley, trapped, stood there and waited.
He’s got a knife! Run, you idiot!
The man took out a letter-sized envelope. He held it up for Charley to see. At first, Charley thought he did have a knife, for his mind had precluded the possibility of anything else. But then it slowed and focused on the envelope.
What the hell is that? He wondered.
“It’s my check,” the man said, as if reading his mind. “But it’s not good till tomorrow. It’s for me, Jonathan Jones. That’s my name.”
Who talks like that? Hi, yeah, not someone you want hanging around. Not in a neighborhood like this. Give him a fucking dollar so he’ll leave!
Charley was one of those terribly forgetful people who never remembered what they had in their wallets—the sort who order a coffee and then have to charge it because they have no cash. He felt the poor man’s eyes on him, felt them follow the path of his hand to his pocket. Oh, and those eyes certainly watched as Mr. Allen took the wallet out; they grew large and—worse—hopeful. Smart Mr. Allen opened his wallet and found it empty save for a gas receipt (paid for by credit card) from this morning. He looked up. The bum had moved closer. His eyes were wide. Charley Allen, once frightened, was now terrified.
“I-I’m sorry,” Charley said. “I…I don’t have anything.”
“A dollar? You don’t have a dollar?”
“No, I’m sorry. I wish I did.”
God, did he mean that. God, did he not want to die here.
The man lingered, his throat working as if he were trying to swallow something thick. Charley looked to his car again. He would never make it. He was going to die right here on these steps. Sarah would get a call from someone and that someone would tell Sarah that he, Charley, had been murdered on the stoop of a Queens, NY ghetto. The murderer had robbed him, they would say, but they had left his wallet because it had been fucking empty!
“A
dollar,” the bum mumbled.
His head rose, and he glanced to the sky. His eyes looked glassy and terrible. He had the look of someone searching for Divine Answers. Charley didn’t think he would find Answers in the dull gray mire that passed as the sky today. The bum’s head dropped.
Page down, Charley thought absurdly.
The bum nodded—nodded weakly—and turned. He moved up the street, his feet apparently just within his control as he lurched away. Charley waited for a long time, watching the man move down the misty damp sidewalk. He saw the man fading, fading, and then vanish around a corner.
For how long Charley stood there and thanked God, he didn’t know. His hands were trembling, and getting the Dentyne out of his pocket proved challenging. There was something about the crunching of the hard outer-shell of the gum that soothed him. And the motion of his jaw. He popped two pieces in, chewed, and glanced again to the corner around which the bum had vanished. It was empty.
Eventually, he remembered that he was here for a reason, and that reason was the house behind him. He turned and looked at the boarded-up door. He didn’t want to go inside. Not yet. He was still shaken, and the house’s cold darkness would not calm him. He unclipped his cell phone and called Sarah. She answered on the second ring.
“Hey.”
“Hey! Are you okay?”
She was always nervous when he went on these jobs. It was a semi-big contract his employer had won recently to do lead-paint inspections on government-owned foreclosed homes, most of which were in not-too-good neighborhoods.
“I’m okay,” he said.
He thought about the bum, but didn’t say anything to Sarah; there was no point worrying her. Across the street on the porch of a row home, an obese black woman appeared with a large garbage bag. She watched him suspiciously as she walked down the stairs; each downward step looked somehow grueling, as only an overweight person could make it look.
“I haven’t gone inside yet. How is it going there?”
“Busy! I haven’t sat down since I got here!”
“Did you expect anything different?”
“No,” she sighed. Sarah worked in a day-care and came home exhausted most of the time.
“I can’t really talk now.”
“I know, just wanted to let you know I was alive.”
Normally, he might have smiled. He didn’t this time. He thought about the way the bum’s eyes had searched the sky as if in supplication.
“That’s not funny,” Sarah said.
“I know,” he said, really meaning it. “I’m sorry. Love you.”
“Love you too, and be careful. Call me when you’re heading back to the office?”
“Okay.”
He hung up and clipped the phone back to his belt. He imagined Sarah busily moving around that day-care, kids circulating like wild pinballs, bouncing off walls, tables, people, and she, Sarah, trying to keep them under control and probably doing a good job of it.
He studied the house. It had been boarded up so that no one could break-in and squat (Charley had checked the perimeter to make sure there was no evidence of anyone getting in; there had been none). He bent to get the key, which he had dropped, and then he went to work on the lock again.
It took him ten numbing minutes to get the lock open. He pulled the board/door out and the dark house greeted him with a gust of frigid air. He wished that the lock hadn’t worked. Then he could’ve called his boss and told him, nope, sorry—just couldn’t get it open. I should leave? Okay, thanks. Yeah, it was a fucked up area anyway.
What he saw beyond the door was this: old worn stairs leading up to a dark hallway. Tattered remains of a vomit green carpet, shredded in circular spots as if from acidic ceiling-drips. Small black droppings on the floor, the dropper’s species not exactly clear. Most of all, he saw full thick darkness against which his flashlight would be hard-pressed.
He fumbled in his pocket and took out another piece of gum. Chewing it reverently, feeling slightly relaxed, he took a step into the house. His breath turned immediately to vapor, and the cold cut through his gloves. He did a quick circuit of the home, using the feeble flashlight. He found no signs of anyone squatting in the house, but he did find something odd. In a bedroom on the second floor someone had decided to use the walls as a blackboard. Three messages had been written on three separate walls.
I’m dreaming, he thought. The bum wasn’t real and this house isn’t real and these messages are certainly not real.
He read the messages aloud.
“Love is love.”
It was written in black ink, as if with a Sharpee. He read the next message.
“Love is pain.”
The last message was written on the wall to his right. This one he didn’t read out loud. He read it in his mind:
Love is pain, and only God knows what I’ve suffered in this house. There is a better place.
A sudden, intense image pervaded Charley’s mind: he imagined a lover, broken-hearted, beating their mutinous ex-love—beating, swearing, slobbering…blood, Jesus, there was blood all over the wall, splashed and splattered in angry strips. The fact that the house had been foreclosed made the thought worse. Had the messenger been the owner? Had he or she just gone crazy? He didn’t like it. Not at all.
I should just leave, he thought. Fuck the work. Will it matter? The company’s going down and no semi-big contracts are going to save it.
He knew he wouldn’t just leave. He was one of those people cursed (blessed?) with too much loyalty. He left the bedroom and slowly went to the first floor. There he gathered his equipment and went to the basement. The basements in the abandoned houses were always the worst. He liked to get them over with first.
This basement was no worse than any of the others; it was dark and damp and cold. Black mold grew in wizardly spots along the wall, as if someone had cast a spell to make the spores develop. Charley, shining the light around to the dark corners, got to work. The inspection would take at least an hour—probably two—and that was more time than he wanted to spend in this place.
He worked and thought about Sarah, about their future. The bad news was that this job might not last much longer. In better times, the company used to send two employees on jobs like this for safety. When money diminished, safety was usually the first thing to go—especially in this line of work. Charley wasn’t blind; he sensed the growing unease in the office. Last month they had fired a secretary, an inspector, and a data entry person. He knew he wasn’t worth much more than those three.
Sarah and he were planning on getting engaged, marrying, moving out, moving on…and since they had decided that, Charley had learned what real doubt, real uncertainty was. Part of the problem was that Sarah and he were corrupted from upper-middle class lifestyles. They didn’t want a small house in a not-quite ghetto town of New Jersey. Once, after a few drinks out on her parent’s deck, Charley had told her his dream:
A nice house, he had said. First and most important is a nice house. It will have a lot of property—maybe an acre or two--and we can decorate for every holiday. In the back we’ll have a swing-set so the kids will have something to play on—when we have them. Two or three? Okay. And you can have a garden, baby, and you can plant tomatoes and zucchini, though I won’t eat the zucchini; you know I hate that shit. And I’ll watch you in the summer in your little shorts with your white legs, and when you bend over to hoe or rake or whatever, I’ll watch you more closely. I might help, but probably I’ll just watch. In the winter we’ll have a fire and drink hot tea, or maybe eggnog and rum dusted with cinnamon. We’ll snuggle in bed and, if it snows, we can look outside and watch the deer prance across our lawn, their foot-prints highlighted in the low glow of the Christmas lights.
He was so deep into his thoughts that it took the noise a moment to register on his mind: it was the so-slight creak of a sore spot on the ceiling.
He froze. Someone was in the house.
He stopped using his machine, it falling sile
nt, and he listened. Cold silence was all he heard.
You imagined it
He waited for a sound, any noise, but there was none. He had imagined it. He was about to start again when the floor creaked again. The short sound, shrill, sent a black shiver through his body.
I didn’t imagine that, did I?
You did.
I did?
There it was again: the soft secretive press of a foot. It had to be a foot!
“Who’s there!” He cried.
No answer.
For a long time there was no answer, and Charley stood stock-still in the dark basement, waiting, hoping, praying. After a longer time passed, he decided to be sure he was alone. He went up the stairs to the kitchen. He went slowly and carefully, each step creaking mutinously under his body’s weight. He flipped the flashlight up on his shoulder. It was a steel Mag-Lite, and it could double as a weapon, if he needed it to. The kitchen door was open, and he peaked up, his eyes just rising higher than the kitchen floor. He saw no one. He saw nothing save for the dark empty kitchen and, in the distance, the gray rectangular outline of the front door he had left open. A cold rain was beginning to fall outside.
He watched and listened for a long time—how long, he didn’t know. When he was convinced that no one was in the house—that he had imagined the noises—he went back down into the basement.
He never heard the back door being breeched, and he never saw what hit him.
2
The day made his bones hurt. He hadn’t slept in a week, and his body was in withdrawal. His thoughts were nearly always fogged. He didn’t know his name (yes, yes you do; it’s Jonathan Jones), didn’t know anything from his past, but he knew that he had come from New York City. He was…where was he? Queens? Was that it? He thought it might be. He had no idea how he had gotten from New York City to Queens. Maybe he had begged or peddled for the money. Once he had crafted a large sign and stood directly outside of the Holland tunnel. Homeless and Starving on My Birthday, the sign had said. He had made five dollars that day.
