Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  AFTERWORD

  Dear Reader,

  Whew. That was one messed-up novel. Demon fetuses? Murder, ghosts, racists, the whole wasp issue. What was I thinking?

  Well, I'll tell you. I wrote Breeder when I was 28, and it came out a couple of years later (after my first novel, Goat Dance, in 1989.)

  I wrote the first draft of the novel in the house in which it's set, although I took liberties with the location and aspects of the home. I love Washington, D.C. -- I mostly grew up around the city and then moved to it right after college. But one disturbing aspect of Washington in those days was what was called "gentrification," which was a nice word for "throw people with less money out and attract higher-rent-payers in." This manifested itself as racism, all under the guise of "improving neighborhoods."

  And then, I just made it all up, a nightmare in my mind, unfolding.

  As I mentioned earlier, this is one of my nastier stories, up there with The Abandoned, The Attraction -- and maybe The Necromancer (although that's pretty much a tale of Victorian debauchery).

  Hey, it's horror fiction. I write into the nightmare, and just go with the story's flow. Sometimes, the result is quiet horror (Nightmare House, Isis) and other times, it's those demon fetuses (or feti?)

  But I am a lover of pulp fiction, with a capital P. I also love the literary stuff, and most things in-between, so long as it keeps me reading. I hope you've enjoyed this humble, demented little offering.

  With best wishes,

  Douglas Clegg

  May 11, 2012

  PUBLICATION INFORMATION

  Published by Alkemara Press, in an arrangement with the author. All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1990, 2012 Douglas Clegg

  Cover Design Copyright © 2012 Alkemara Press

  Cover images courtesy of iStockphoto.com, © Erin Castillo, © Cliff Wassmann, used with permission.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Douglas Clegg is the award-winning author of more than 25 books, including Afterlife, The Children’s Hour, The Hour Before Dark, The Harrow Series, The Criminally Insane Series, Purity and many others.

  Find out more:

  http://DouglasClegg.com

  Praise for Douglas Clegg’s Fiction

  “Clegg’s stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby.”

  —Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author.

  “Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction.”

  —Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story and, with Stephen King, The Talisman

  “Douglas Clegg is the best horror novelist of the post-Stephen King generation.”

  — Bentley Little, USA Today bestselling author of The Haunted.

  “Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale…”

  —The Daily News (New York)

  AFTERLIFE

  a novel

  Douglas Clegg

  ALKEMARA PRESS

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  “We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so at the moment after death.”

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne

  “There are monsters in the world. They’re called human beings.”

  —Michael Diamond, from The Life Beyond

  Prologue

  1

  In the testing room, the boy stared at the others from behind the glass.

  He raised his fists and began hitting the thick pane.

  The flames shot up in the booth around him, moving rapidly up the boy’s back as he pounded harder, his mouth open impossibly wide.

  He shut his eyes as if trying to block it all out or to send his mind to another, safer place.

  The others watched, safe on the opposite side of the triple-thick fireproof glass, and waited as the fire burned away the boy’s shirt.

  They held hands, and one of the girls said, “Look how scared he is.”

  “We need to get out,” a teenager said. “Now.”

  And then the fire shattered the glass, moving beyond the booth, beyond the testing room, as if the air itself burned out of control.

  2

  In the 1970s, a rumor circulated that a small, privately funded school in Manhattan existed where young children with special talents were being observed and tested for what were then labeled “PSI” abilities.

  Little was known about the school, other than what remained enshrouded in the urban legends of the city. The conspiracy theory suggested that the government or several governments funded the school and used it to learn more about the human mind, about child development with extra-sensory ability, and perhaps how to use those abilities in some covert way.

  Another story grew that it was simply formed by a group who believed that these so-called “special children” should have a safe place to develop their talents.

  Still, most people who’d heard about it believed that this was one of the city’s many small private schools, a target of malicious rumor from a handful of unhappy, overly entitled former students seeking to discredit their alma mater.

  One of the rumors had to do with a little boy who precipitated the closing of the secret school when he somehow was responsible for the death of another child.

  The school was supposed to have existed somewhere near the Chelsea District of New York City, although its exact location was anyone’s guess.

  The school was called Daylight.

  Part One: Now

  Chapter One

  1

  She opened her eyes to darkness. Her breathing: slow, warm, but too shallow. Something was wrong.

  Blindfolded? Not sure.

  She pressed her eyes closed and then open again. Nothing but a claustrophobic night. Her breath came back at her—an enclosed space. A dizziness, and pins-and-needles feelings in her toes and fingers. Paralyzed?

  Buried. Buried alive.

  Throat dry. A thudding—her heartbeat? No light at all. Not even cracks through the box. Coffin? A large trunk? She was squeezed in, and her limbs felt numb.

  Dear God. Dear God.

  Slow, deep breath. Hammering in her head. Wetness along her neck.

  You won’t get anywhere if you panic.

  This crawlspace. This…casket.

  Blurred images came to her: the white room, the feeling of being laid gently down on some bed, twine wrapped around his hands as he reached for her …

  Your hands. Move. Reach.

  Her hands were bound in front of her. Thick twine connected her wrists, and as she tugged as hard as she could—barely able to move—she remembered how he’d spoken gently to her. She had been drugged, after all. He had incapacitated her in some way she didn’t understand.

  Blocked. No matter how hard she tried to roam with her mind, something blocked her.

  Her lips, parched. She opened them, but only a ragged whisper of a sigh came out. Help me. Please, she wanted to say. No, there must be a way out. Must be. This may be a test. It may be another test. It may not be what it seems. It’s just a test. Surely. Please dear God.

  Please, she tried to say. Someone...

  Then, she heard the voice, barely a whisper. He must be pressing his face near the sealed lid of the box.

  “Don’t be afraid, Gina. Don’t be afraid. Just let it happen.”

  His words had the opposite effect on her. She felt as if she had begun hyperventilating. She fought back tears.

  And then she felt the heaviness of her breathing—it hurt her lungs. She tried to take in too much air, but there wasn’t enough.

  Please, somebody, help me.

  A sound above her. Just above her face.

  On the other side of the box.

  And then, she gasped, because the air was ru
nning out too fast.

  2

  Miles from the city, in the wilds of northern New Jersey, out along the lakes beneath the great and small houses rising up among dense woods, spring has only just awakened. The ice only just melted weeks before, the new grass exploding with bright green, with the lavender and yellow of crocus and wildflowers.

  Someone’s hunting.

  3

  A man stood on an empty plateau in a brief but undisturbed wilderness, overlooking a placid silver lake.

  It was a day of winds, a good sign as far as he was concerned. He carried his burden through the tall grass that twisted as the breeze whiffled through it. His boots went into the mud deep, and he pressed slowly through the swampy land until he’d reached the slight rise of the bank.

  He set the man down, relieved to be free of the heaviness.

  The man looked up at him, drowsily.

  He felt the push of wind at his back; he knelt down beside the man, reached into his breast pocket for the knife, and set about his grim task.

  The man beneath him. Eyes open. Watching.

  He matched his victim, breath for breath.

  The killer caught his breath as he brought the small blade down with the precision of a surgeon.

  He closed his eyes and penetrated the mind of his victim, just as surely as his knife cut into the man’s sternum:

  The sweetness of the air. Electrical impulses sparking. The smell of ozone—a whiff of ecstasy, and then, gone, thrown into the other.

  Penetrating.

  He broke through the barrier.

  He experienced what his victim felt.

  Burning pain. Along his neck and the back of his head. But not in his chest area. Instead, that was a dull throbbing ache.

  Then, another thrust of the blade—stabbing close to his heart—and he lost his vision entirely. Weakness flooded him. The pain was located in his head—a screaming. But he had already begun to disconnect from it, as if a cord were snapped from its power source, and he were drawn into the source of power itself.

  He held a lingering connection to his body.

  Within the victim’s mind, the killer experienced the curious sensation of still being aware.

  Not precisely lucid, but aware.

  Inside the victim’s consciousness:

  He felt as if his breath contained his essence, and it coughed into a darkness—he moved, propelled, through some dark void. All the while, he was aware of the others, there, around his body, as if his memory still held them, and the place, the last moments of his life—held them in perfect balance with this new feeling.

  It wasn’t a sense of being a physical body, but of being a solid form, undefined by material barriers but kept in place, an entity.

  He moved through the darkness, half expecting to open his eyes. Any anger or resentment he’d felt had run its course just as his blood had trickled from his body. He was on a new voyage now, and knew that the thread was slender, holding him between his last breaths and the doorway through Death.

  Then, he felt a shift—as if something weren’t working right. He kept waiting to be brought back into life, but instead, he felt a general weakness, as if his mind were growing tired.

  A steep descent. Falling. Smells came up, almonds and peaches, wonderful odors that he hadn’t experienced in years—since childhood—of jasmine and fresh, running river water, orange blossom and even a sharp vinegar bite of a stink. His senses felt as if they were releasing memories, of tastes and scents, all exploding as he fell.

  Fear came, as well.

  Fear that leaked into madness, and he tried to cling to his memory, and tried to shout himself back to consciousness.

  The killer kept the knife in his victim’s chest, experiencing everything with his victim, feeling the descent into death, trying to stay with his victim so that there was no fear of what was to come.

  Chapter Two

  1

  In the early afternoon, off the path along one of the trails of the Jenny Jump Mountain of northern New Jersey, deep in the woods bursting with new green growth beyond the slight hills above a placid brown lake, a woman and her young daughter hunted for fossils alongside a creek.

  The outcroppings of rock between patches of forest had fascinated the little girl as they’d wandered, and her mother pointed out what she’d remembered from her college years about the area. “Some of these rocks are 1.6 billion years old.”

  “That’s old,” her daughter said, making her mother chuckle at how mature Livy could sound, even at six and a half.

  “That’s why you can sometimes find fossils.”

  “Like you used to with Gramma. When you were little.”

  “Yep. Right along here.”

  “I love days like this,” Livy said.

  Julie chuckled. “Why’s that?”

  Livy hesitated, then sighed a little. “Well, just you and me, Mommy. After school. And you don’t have to go to work today. And Matty doesn’t come home ’til later. I just...I just sorta like it.”

  “Me, too, sweetie.”

  The view beyond them, over the ridge, was of the Kittatinny Mountains, and Great Meadows. The sky was damp with the recently passed rain, and the fresh, pungent smell of the wild permeated the countryside.

  They’d found a possum skull, two arrowheads, and what they thought might be a small cracked trilobite print on a rock fragment. “This was once part of a glacier,” she told her daughter. “That’s why we have all these lakes.”

  “Like Ghost Lake. And Forest Lake. And …Lake Pesomething.”

  “Lake Pequest.”

  “Where’d it go?” her daughter asked.

  “What?”

  “Where’d the glacier go?”

  “Well, the earth changes. The earth shifts, the earth warms, the glaciers melt, and then it recedes. Over millions of years a lot of stuff can happen.”

  “That’s scary,” Livy said. “What if the ocean comes back?”

  “Well, if it ever did, we’d have beachfront property. See this?” Julie Hutchinson held the bit of trilobite fossil up for her daughter’s inspection. “Once, these lived all over the place here. Swimming underwater.” Julie tried to remember if that was precisely correct—she had come up to these woods with her grandmother, who knew a lot more about the trilobites than she ever would. She and her grandmother had never gotten along all that well, except for their mutual love of nature and exploration.

  Livy took the fossil into her cupped hands and looked at it. Then, up to her mother. “Is it a dinosaur?”

  Julie considered how she’d respond. She was screwed when it came to the precise classification of a trilobite. “Sort of.”

  “Wow.”

  After a minute of turning the fossil over in her hands, Livy passed it back to her mother, who dropped it into the small green knapsack they’d brought that had contained their bottles of water, and now also held the smooth pebbles, bits of shell, and arrowheads they’d collected during the late afternoon. Then Livy went back down to the creek, crouching to look around the rocks and fallen logs for more fossils.

  Julie Hutchinson felt a gentle tingling in her hand, and for some reason, it made her think of Hut, the way he grabbed her hand sometimes.

  The way he did when she thought he was in love with her. Back in the courtship days. Back before the storm clouds had come into their marriage.

  An animal scent nearby—dead raccoon? Possum? She hoped it wasn’t too close. Immediately, she glanced over at her daughter, who was teetering back and forth on a log at the edge of the creek, her small feet curving around the wood as if trying to clutch it. Livy had an enthusiastic smile on her face, and she leaped from the log into the sandy edge of the creek, causing a splattering that nearly reached Julie.

  “Liv,” she scolded. The hem of her daughter’s dress was already soaked. “Olivia Hutchinson, get out of the water.”

  Her daughter looked down at the water around her ankles. “I’m only a little in it, Mommy. It’s fr
eezing. I like it.”

  Julie let this one go. She glanced across to the other bank. That warm odor of a rotting wild creature wasn’t unusual in the woodlands and the several creeks just beyond their town. Sometimes she saw deer pausing between thickets, and recently, she and Livy got to see a beaver swimming down toward its dam.

  “We should get back to the car. We need to pick up Matty next,” Julie said.

  Julie crouched down to pick up some small, nearly round pebbles her daughter had dropped. She glanced over at Livy, who stared across at the view beyond the ridge, to the slope that led down to the lake.

  Her daughter’s face had a curious slant to it—Livy squinted and her nose wrinkled slightly, her head gently turning a bit, not quite looking up at the trees, but nearly.

  “Mommy?” Livy asked, detecting something was wrong. “Daddy says it’s all right.”

  Julie pushed herself up from the muddy grass. “He always says that.”

  “He said it just now.”

  “On your brain radio,” Julie said, grinning. It was a joke between Livy and her father that they could communicate on something Hut had made up called a “brain radio.”

  The wind came up again; it got a bit chilly. Julie was about to lift Livy up out from the muddy water, afraid she might get a bit of a cold from being out when the weather was about to make such a sharp change.