Zack had just finished reciting the nursery rhyme—I heard the last line of it.
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
I stared at them in silence. I looked around at the stone walls and out into the night as darkness swung low around the slopes and trees beyond the property.
Then back at these children.
I watched Zack. This little boy whose world had been disrupted: his mother and father divorced, a new man in the house, the memories of that awful night in December still no doubt immense in his mind.
A world that he didn't choose himself.
Who had taught him?
The Dark Game was an addiction. It wasn't something that could be stopped just by wanting it to be stopped.
Knowing it was there, it got in your blood.
Children were going to play it.
They had begun playing it before dark, and now, with full night around us, it would take them over. They must have heard about it. Zack would know about it, just from listening in on conversations. Children did that sometimes, and adults never really thought they were listening so carefully.
Zack looked the way I must've looked at his age. Blindfold on, saying what seemed like unintelligible words.
For the barest second, I thought that perhaps this was wholly innocent. That it was my own experience, and my own perception that colored my intense negative reaction to watching children play the Dark Game. That we three—Bruno, Brooke, and I—and perhaps even our father—had twisted it with the terrible trauma we'd gone through together. With watching our mother be brutally tortured and murdered. With whatever my father had experienced in those POW camps when he'd been in his twenties.
It was us. No one else. Not other children. Surely.
"Zack?" I finally said, still reeling inside from the initial shock. "Zack?" I took a step forward, and then another.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My throat went dry.
I felt a crackle of static electricity in the air.
When I reached him, I crouched down and put my hand on his shoulder. The other children's breathing seemed labored and heavy.
As gently as I could, I tried to wake him.
To bring him out of the game.
But in his mind, he'd already gone elsewhere.
* * *
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BOOKS BY DOUGLAS CLEGG
Click here to discover more fiction by Douglas Clegg.
STAND-ALONE NOVELS
Afterlife
Breeder
The Children’s Hour
Dark of the Eye
Goat Dance
The Halloween Man
The Hour Before Dark
Mordred, Bastard Son
Naomi
Neverland
You Come When I Call You
SHORT NOVELS & NOVELLAS
The Attraction
Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters
Isis
Purity
The Chateau of Devils
The Words
SERIES
THE HARROW SERIES
Nightmare House, Book 1
Mischief, Book 2
The Infinite, Book 3
The Abandoned, Book 4
The Necromancer (Prequel Novella)
Isis (Prequel Novella)
THE CRIMINALLY INSANE SERIES
Bad Karma, Book 1
Red Angel, Book 2
Night Cage, Book 3
THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY
The Priest of Blood, Book 1
The Lady of Serpents, Book 2
The Queen of Wolves, Book 3
COLLECTIONS
Lights Out: Collected Stories
Night Asylum
The Nightmare Chronicles
Wild Things
BUNDLES & BOX SETS
Coming of Age
Criminally Insane: The Series
Halloween Chillers
Harrow: Three Novels (Books 1-3)
The Vampyricon Trilogy
With more new novels, novellas and stories to come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award, and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.
A pioneer in the ebook world, his novel Naomi made international news when it was launched as the world’s first ebook serial in early 1999 and was called “the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace” by Publisher’s Weekly, covered in Time magazine, Business Week, Business 2.0, BBC Radio, NPR, USA Today and more; his book Purity was the first to go onto a mobile phone in the U.S. in early 2001.
He is married, and lives and writes in New England in a house called Villa Diodati.
DISCLAIMER
The Hour Before Dark is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PUBLICATION CREDITS
Copyright 2002, 2014 Douglas Clegg
Published by Alkemara Press in the United States.
Cover art provided by:
Damonza.com
Breeder
By Douglas Clegg
Copyright © 1990, 2012 Douglas Clegg
Published by Alkemara Press, at Smashwords
Additional publication information at the end of this ebook.
First Digital Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of the author. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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PROLOGUE
THE SCREAMING HOUSE
1.
April 1968
The girl could still taste the kerosene on her lips.
Her name was Nadine and she had been feverish for the past four nights.
The decision had not been made by her, but by her lover. She hadn’t wanted to go through with it; she had no energy to resist.
Just the throbbing pain, the leaking blood.
If she’d been coherent, this seventeen-year-old girl would’ve told them that her baby was going to be all right, that she knew the baby would be all right, even if she herself died.
She was not afraid of death if it meant her baby would breathe and grow.
She lay down in something cool and hard like stone, a large basin. The room smelled of rubbing alcohol and soap; the odor of kerosene and vinegar still lingered.
Above her were the most beautiful dark eyes she’d ever seen, so warm and cool at the same time; eyes that looked into her to find the root of this pain, this illness.
Her own vision wavered, and the world around her became transparent, empty, as she tried to look beyond this shadowy room, through these beautiful eyes into another existence, into a dream where there was no pain.
She saw no faces in the room, only eyes, only hands, only lips curling in smiles and anger.
Someone above her, a white hand, wiped her brow with a cold, wet hand towel. Nadine shivered; it was like ice on her forehead.
These people surrounding her in this small room were no more substantial than the dreams she had at night: she thought she could pass her hand through them like ghosts.
Who was here with her? Who would help with the birth of her child?
A man, her lover she thought, said, “The whole damn block’s going up. What the hell’s this going to do to property values?”
But the man to whom the beautiful eyes belonged, the man who watched over her as the spasms hit, grasped her hand as she tried to pass her fingers through him. “Have faith, your child shall be born.”
His large hand seemed to swallow hers alive like a hawk devouring a fish. She felt his pulse—a pounding drum. It beat steadily, hopefully against the ever-weakening sound of her own heart.
Where was her mother?
Her mother had promised to stay with her. To hold her hand the way this man held her hand. Her mother’s hand was warmer than this man’s, warmer and softer, open, unfolding.
Her mother was there among the smoky shadows, but why wasn’t she beside Nadine now? Why would a mother hide from her daughter?
Her lover, out in that misty darkness of the room, muttered, “Jesus, do you think this could go a little faster?”
“Baron Samedi,” Nadine gasped. It was a plea; the pain was clutching the baby inside her, the room was dislodging itself from the earth and running away, her womb would burst with overripe, fermented fruit. “Baron Samedi, I pray…”
Her lover whispered, “I’m not going to wait around here for some lunatic to shoot out the window!”
“Please,” Nadine gasped to the woman she could not see who stood above her. Her ribs were chafing against her skin as if they longed to break free of her.
She knew then that she was going to die.
She wasn’t scared, not with the man with the dark eyes holding her, leaning toward her.
They called him Baron Samedi, guardian of the graveyards and the dead. She did not believe, not like her mother believed, but if it saved her baby, Nadine would believe in anything.
The man above her grinned. His teeth seemed huge, but that was her fever. His teeth seemed to be coming down for her, down for her baby, down to find the place inside her where her baby’s heart beat.
Her lover screamed.
Then her mother (She’s here! She’s with me! She will protect me!) cried out, “My baby, what you doin’ to my baby girl?”
Then Nadine felt and heard nothing.
Her breathing stopped and what little life there was in her empty body ran out in a warm, red pool from between her legs.
2.
April 1989
“Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise,” Hugh whispered. “Maybe it’s just as well. Scout.”
Rachel knew that he wasn’t about to do his Let’s Pretend line:
Let’s Pretend, Scout, that you’re the mommy and I’m the daddy and we have a whole mess of kiddos, an acre of kiddos, and I’m coming home from work at the end of a hard day and you’re exhausted and we sit up and read them bedtime stories ‘til they fall asleep… Nope, Let’s Pretend went out the window when you got a miscarriage in the family. A blessing in disguise.
She’d cried for three weeks over this particular blessing, soon followed by a therapist, two group sessions a day for three weeks, a psychiatrist, a brief (and less than heavenly) flirtation with antidepressants. She still kept the leftover pills in a shoebox beneath the bathroom sink on the off chance that she might get the urge to jump out a window again. It had been great fun, if useless, getting all the medical attention over what she basically felt was a fact of Normal Life ( lots of nice folks have miscarriages, although Rachel herself didn’t seem to know any of them). And even if she did start crying every time she saw babies, or when she accidentally wandered into the baby supply area of Dart Drug and caught herself buying Pampers, or in Safeway picking up Gerber’s baby chicken. Only her work seemed to keep her from forgetting what Hugh had called “a minor glitch.”
“It’s just as well,” Hugh said (had said, would continue to say).
Rachel hated him for that and also loved him for that; he even promised he would make it up to her, that he would kiss it and make it better, that this was a blow, certainly, no one would deny how tragic it was, but couldn’t they turn it around? Couldn’t they try to see it as a momentary setback, but in the long run an advantage? Wouldn’t there be things to compensate?
She didn’t really hear him say all this.
She heard the words the way she would listen to the radio while ironing or eating breakfast. Instead she wondered if she really wanted to be married at all, except to have children; how she could’ve just lived with Hugh and that would’ve been enough, except she’d been pregnant, except she’d wanted a child, and now for some reason that child had chosen not to be born of her.
“Nature took care of it, Scout, it must be for the better. You have to try and see it that way,” Hugh droned on, and no doubt her doctor had prepped him on the sorts of lines to feed her, and she loved him for it, and she despised him for these spineless rationalizations, but she loved him, too.
She loved him because when she didn’t love him she hated herself and remembered the other woman, the one who was dead. Hugh’s first wife.
Hugh always emphasized that they weren’t financially ready for a baby, not yet, his feet weren’t on the ground, he still had to try the bar for one more go ‘round, his job as a consultant in a tax lawyer’s office was only for six months and would be over soon, and how could she really afford to leave her firm so soon, anyway? Just a year or so at the outside and then, yes, a whole litter of babies if you want, so you see it’s just as well. Although Hugh wouldn’t say babies, because it was a word they both avoided.
He would blanket her with hugs and kisses while she turned her face into the pillow. It’s not a baby, it’s just a little sphere, a little subdividing sphere, a glitch in the system.
Rachel loved her husband then and hated him more than she’d ever hated anyone; and she hated her body for betraying her like that.
Later, when she was feeling less tired and Hugh brought in a large bowl of ice cream, he told her about the house his father was giving them as a late wedding present.
Rachel sniffed at the ice cream as if smelling it might make her feel better. What I really want is a cigarette, but I guess I’ll just get healthy and fat.
She was purposefully trying not to act too excited about getting the house. That would kill it if she acted too excited; perhaps her excitement had killed her little sphere, too. Hugh didn’t like it when she was enthusiastic; he didn’t trust liking anything too much. She said, “See, your dad’s coming around, I knew he would.”
Hugh didn’t respond. He pretended to read the paper; chocolate ice cream on his upper lip. She knew that he had only accepted the gift as a means of compensating for the miscarriage. This was part of Hugh Adair’s sense of fair play, and which Rachel knew was the underlying reason he had trouble with the concept of being a lawyer: fair play was rarely involved. He thrived on frustrating himself. He wanted very little to do with his father, but he would accept the house for Rachel’s sake, and then get numerous headaches concerning how miserable he was knowing he’d let the Old Man, as he called his father, buy them this way.
For a split second Rachel considered that she could avoid a lot of trouble about this wonderful if tardy wedding gift by simply saying, “Oh, Hugh, let’s wait until we can really afford a house on our own terms. Let’s not have the Old Man lording it over us, let’s not compromise our integrity.
But it was only a split second, and then Rachel came to her senses.
She put the bowl of ice cream aside. “Our very first house. Is it in a good neighborhood?”
&nbs
p; CHAPTER ONE
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
1.
She walked ahead of Hugh, through the alley, stepping over broken glass, around a trash heap. This side of the house was in constant shadow, this wall looked more like old plaster than stone, and the only window onto the alley was small and bricked over. Well, who wants to look out their window and see an alley full of trash and the wall of the next building over, anyway? When she reached the Hammer Street side of the house, facing the park, she waited for Hugh. In the park she saw a little boy and girl playing what seemed to be a game of freeze tag: Where was their mother? How could a woman let her children run through a city park like that all by themselves? This wasn’t the worst or the best neighborhood in Washington, D.C., but it was getting better; even so, how could anyone take a chance like that?
Dark Rooms: Three Novels Page 25
