"And they just blocked it off?"
"Yeah, blasted it shut. Dynamited it at either end. But it still goes in about fifty feet or so. In high school my friends and I used to ditch class and come hang out here." He looked at her and blushed again. "Not that I was a total delinquent or anything."
She smiled at him. He smiled back. They walked into the tunnel.
It was cooler inside. Evidence of generations covered the arched roof above their heads, layers of graffiti and soot, streaked with moss wherever rivulets found passage through the concrete. The air was heavy, laden with silence and the smell of dark earth. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket and turned it on.
"Been a long time," he said, almost to himself.
The beam of his flashlight moved across the dirt floor, across the walls and finally to the earthen ramp at the far end of the space.
"Is that the...?"
"Where they blasted it, yeah."
They walked further in. She shivered, folding her arms across her chest and wishing she hadn't left her sweater in the car.
"If you go up on the hillside directly above this spot, there's a crater where it all caved-in. We tried to dig in there once from above, because according to legend they left things in the tunnel when they sealed it."
"According to legend?"
He chuckled. "Uh-huh."
"Left what?"
"For sure old rail cars. But there were rumors that the cars had things in them, like munitions, army equipment, surplus stuff from World War II. And then there were other rumors too, like the cars were filled with radioactive waste or a nuclear bomb." She had to giggle at that. He laughed with her.
"I know, huh? But it gets even better." They were at the foot of the ramp now. His flashlight played across it. "There were claims that it was alien technology from an ancient space-ship they dug-up in the desert outside of Roswell, or the body of—"
"Hey ... what's that?" She pointed.
At the very top of the dirt ramp, where it met with the fractured concrete ceiling, was a hole. The beam of his flashlight was a small crescent in its mouth.
"Whoa. Must be an animal burrow." He paused only for a moment before climbing up the ramp. He reached the hole and pointed his flashlight inside. "It is a burrow or something. It goes back quite a ways. And down."
"What do you think made it?"
"I don't know. Badger maybe? It's almost big enough to crawl in there. I think it's too tight though. Huh. I think I can see—"
The dirt at the top of the ramp suddenly swelled, puffed-out like it was infused with a static charge. All at once Tobin became translucent. He lit up from the inside and she could see his organs and his bones. He began to scream.
Involuntarily she backed away, just as the ground near her bulged, and she felt it in the small of her back and up her spine. Her bladder let go and then there were thousands of millions of them under her skin like centipedes, crawling and prodding and invading. She felt the moisture sucked from her flesh and then they were in her brain and the world turned inside-out.
They left her hollow.
When she was a little girl, her family raised chickens. She would break open a small pumpkin and feed it to them and they would eat it from the inside, every bit except the very outermost layer of orange skin. She thought it was funny that from the outside it just looked like a pumpkin. But turn it over and you'd see it was only a shell, pecked clean and paper thin. If you weren't careful when you picked-it up it would break apart.
She lay on her side on the moist earth, scooped bare like an autumn gourd.
Tobin's flashlight rolled and bounced down the ramp and came to rest near her hands which were curled upon the ground in front of her face. They were the withered hands of an old, old woman ... of a corpse.
Now she too had begun to scream.
~~~~~
She thought it must have been seeing her face on the flier, reading her name. Why else would these memories have suddenly returned? Whatever the cause, she didn't believe they would last. It was still early afternoon but the sun had become a bright coin in a darkening sky. Her eyes would soon be gone too.
She left the small piece of paper fluttering and moved west, up the green railroad track as it crossed the fields towards the foothills, her mind preyed upon by freshly stark memories of the last time she’d been here.
~~~~~
They'd tried to follow the rail bed back but had lost it and spent that first night wandering in the woods. They knew something had happened to them but thoughts came and went like dabs of sunlight reflected off rippling water. Nothing made sense.
With daylight they were able to navigate back to the main railroad line but couldn't think of what to do next. So they followed the tracks and eventually came to an old water tower. It had a ladder, and they climbed it, thinking that from up high perhaps they'd be able to see something they needed to see.
They stayed in the water tower for three days.
When they finally came down they saw the railroad tracks were still there, so again they followed them and soon found themselves adrift in the crevices of the city, the in-between places where the indigent moved and lived.
Tobin had kept his wallet for a little while. Sometimes he would take it out and try to make sense of it, but it always made him frustrated. Finally he just gave it to a homeless man near the river. The man had been skeptical.
"Where did you get this? Did you steal it?"
"No. It's mine."
"Then why are you giving it to me? Why do you have his guy's ID and stuff?"
"He's me. I'm him. I'm a young man. Just take it."
"Right. Are you trying to set me up?" In the end the man took it. "Crazy old coot." They watched the man ditch all the cards and keep the money. It wasn't much, about thirty dollars. The man kept the wallet too. It was a nice wallet.
In the end the only thing Tobin had kept was his rosary, and while he rarely took it out of its small case, he never seemed to wonder at its importance, although its meaning continued to elude him.
They would try to talk about the tunnel. Most times they couldn't. They would begin to remember but their thoughts would be pulled up short like a horse whose reins are tugged. But sometimes, just for a moment, they could get a glimpse.
"It took our memories. I know we weren't always like this. They take your memories ... they take them. That's how they know what to do next."
"What do they want to do?"
"Live."
It. They. Them. There was no distinction; a pure alien existence defined neither by group nor individual.
He seemed to know more than she did. He'd surmised that maybe it was because he had been closer or because he was the first to be taken, but when it had entered him and right before his mind tore loose from its moorings he'd seen things ... just flashes, like images from a dream. And that was how he knew something had failed inside the tunnel, something that was meant to contain it. He believed it was a simple failure--a switch or a wire or a cap — something that perhaps could easily be set right.
"Maybe we can fix it."
But such thoughts always left as quickly as they came, drawn back and lost in a miasma of frustration and apathy.
In places where the invisible people dwell they were now just two more of the many, adrift and dirty. Once when the police were rousting a group of them, an officer had questioned her about where she'd gotten her shirt ... seems it matched the description of one worn by a missing girl when she went missing. And some personal items of her companion had been found nearby too, credit cards and things. He also was missing. She didn't have an answer. She honestly couldn't remember. The police came around quite a bit at first, but after a time they stopped coming around.
Their hollowness became more and more refined as the months passed.
"I don't understand," she would ask. "Are we alive?"
"We have to be. We're talking."
"But living things eat. They sleep."
"We eat. We sleep."
But they were never hungry. They tried for the longest time, forcing themselves to consume scraps just like the other homeless people living in the filthy river encampments, under bridges and on the bush-covered banks of the freeways. Eventually they gave up.
And they were always tired but sleep came less and less until finally it came no more.
Tobin tried to comprehend the impossibility of it. "We're like florescent lights," he once stated, catching some fleeting memory of high-school science class. "I think some of its energy is still sticking to us, like how static electricity can make a tube glow; that's what is keeping us alive."
"But it's going away."
"Yes, it's fading."
Eventually they started seeing others like themselves, hollow people, empty and crumbling. They weren't surprised by this because more of it was coming out all the time.
They could feel it.
It moved under the ground, through old sewer pipes, abandoned gopher runs, the space between root and dirt, moving and turning, yearning for the time when it would be completely free. Soon it would be able to take anyone from anywhere, not just those who had wandered too close. The night he'd written her the poem the ground beneath them seemed to be writhing eagerly.
I am not drowned ... I am alive
Two days later he was gone and his fate made mockery of the words he'd left behind.
~~~~~
It was even darker in the woods. She could still barely see the rail bed, still detect the path and she shambled onward, her body hitching and swaying like a bicycle with all its screws loosened. She found the creek and splashed across, her feet slipping and glancing from the stones the two of them had used to cross it months before. Several times she fell completely but eventually crawled soaking wet up the steep bank on the other side.
"You can't be here." The voice croaked the words, as though it hadn't spoken in a long time.
He lolled near the edge of the bank, legs curled beneath his slumping body. The back of his hands lay in the dirt. He raised his head, and when she saw his withered face, his lost eyes, she knew.
"You can't be here. I work for the city. You can't be here." His button-up shirt was torn, dirty. She could just make out the patch on his shoulder. Water Department, it read.
"You can't be here. This is city property."
A small sound escaped her as she choked back a cry. "They took your memories, didn't they? They took mine too." Her voice was barely above a whisper.
His head swayed like it might drop forward again, but it didn't. For a moment he just looked confused. Then his eyes suddenly grew wide. "You can't be here!" This time he shouted it as an epiphany. His sagging features swelled into a bloated smile, a joyful recognition of purpose. He raised one filthy hand and pointed.
"I work for the city! You can't be here!" He lurched forward, propelling himself towards her like a partially broken wind-up toy. His expression was that of a man in the midst of a spiritual awakening. "I work for the city! You can't be here!"
With a moan she tried to crawl away but his hand grabbed her leg. She rolled onto her back.
"I work for the city."
She began kicking his face.
"This is city property."
Her kicks were weak, but they connected. Still, he made no attempt to stop them. She kicked again and again.
"You can't be here."
His face turned to blood and dirt and his words became just muffled sounds, a repeating meaninglessness punctuated by the dull cadence of her foot.
And then he was sliding and rolling down the bank away from her. She heard a splash and the blunt sound of flesh and bone against stone. After that there were no more sounds.
She found herself gazing upwards.
The tops of the trees had become black paper cut-outs, the cloudless late-afternoon sky an opaque dream. She lay on her back, breath rasping through the furnace in her chest. After a time she managed to rise and continued stumbling up the trail.
Very soon she was crawling.
Here she felt them everywhere — inside plant and leaf, wood and stone and earth quivering with rank impatience — and she was gripped with an urgency unknown for many months. For while the watery surface of her thoughts had at last become smooth, she felt the pool itself was quickly draining.
All shapes finally melded together into dark oblivion and she thought she could go no further. Then the sound of waterfalls — only trickles this time of year — were enough to let her know she'd reached the portal.
She dragged herself forward and felt the air in the tunnel as it pressed tight around her ears. After a short distance the ground tilted and then she was clawing her way up the ramp.
Her head contacted crumbling mortar. She pawed at the dirt until at last she found the breach. The ground hummed, and waves of them passed through her to no effect. What more could they take? There wasn't much of her left, but perhaps there might be just enough.
Tobin had said he didn't think he could fit into the hole, but she was smaller.
maybe we can fix it
With the last of the failing fumes of her memory she recalled that it had been a dog she had lost. He'd become scared during a lightning storm and ran off and they never found him. His name was Jake.
She was a little girl and had lost her dog. He was a good dog.
Something wet was on her cheek. She thought it might be tears and reached up to feel one moist orb and then the other as they deflated, leaving a puddle and a damp trail that in another life could have passed for sorrow. Dirty fingers investigated the empty sockets and then pulled the lids closed.
It didn't matter. Where she was going it was sure to be dark.
~~~~~
~~~~~
A retired Fire Captain from a large metropolitan city in central California, Daniel Frank DeLong lives deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains with his wife and daughter, two dogs, three cats, a couple of pigs and an ever changing number of chickens, at last count 21. When he's not writing, he spends his time driving his tractor around in the woods, and contemplating the potential collapse of the civilized world ... often doing both at the same time.
(Back to Table of Contents)
Johnny Worthen on Dark Fiction and Horror
by Johnny Worthen; published October 9, 2014
Before I begin to tell you why dark fiction and horror are so wonderful, perhaps you want to know who I am. Well, I’m going to tell you anyway.
I am Johnny Worthen. Next year I’ll release three different books from two different publishers and be a household name in some of my friend’s living rooms. “Why won’t Johnny leave?” they might be saying. “Has he been kicked out of his own house again?”
But now all my published works are dark.
My debut novel BEATRYSEL, an occult thriller/horror was released in 2013. It’s an adult look at the occult and the dark sides of love. If you don’t own it yet, rush on over to Amazon and get one. While you’re there, pick up DR. STUART’S HEART, it’s a little companion piece to BEATRYSEL. You’ll be glad you did. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Done? Good.
This year, my Young Adult Paranormal series, THE UNSEEN launched with the award winning, ELEANOR. It received a Gold Quill as the year’s best published young adult novel by the League of Utah Writers. The same group, having great taste but low standards, named me this year’s Writer of the Year. I got a plaque to prove it.
There is a monster in ELEANOR and thus it has found a horror following along with a young adult, literary, and familial audiences. It’s a great freaking book and if you don’t already own a copy, rush to a bookstore or back to Amazon and pick one up. I’ll wait. Go ahead. Do it. It’s a wonderful book and will go far to making you a better person for having read it. Got it? Good. I’ll continue.
I didn’t intend to be a horror writer when I wrote BEATRYSEL and ELEANOR. It just happened. I needed to push the bounds of fiction and horror was the way to do that. The edges of dark fiction are
blurry and binding. Fear faced deeply, honestly, starkly and raw-ly must by definition be horror.
But that’s a lie. Horror is just a name. Genre is a completely made-up thing. It’s a label critics use to associate and book stores use to shelve. That’s it. Most bookstores I visit have actually taken horror out of its own shelf and put it with general fiction, science fiction, of if they’re really bright in ‘speculative fiction.’
Still we all must agree that horror is a thing, if only for the fact that it names a certain type of writing that has a physical effect on us. It and porno are the two types of fiction that can have measured physical responses to reading it. I’ve never tried writing porn; I’m no good at flash fiction (ba’da-ching!) but getting my heart rate up as tension builds and terrors — both real and imagined — seep into my consciousness is a thrilling experience I create and crave.
But horror goes beyond scares and tension. The best horror is an insidious stream of rationalization and twisted reality, a lingering feeling that is akin to a smothering blanket more than a knife edge. These are the dystopians (Hunger Games) and the invasions (War of the Worlds), the paranoids (Body Snatchers), the plagues (The Stand) and the hopelessnesses (The Road). These are the ones that seep into the imagination and linger. These are the ones where even after the victim has died, there is no respite.
These are intellectual horrors. Often and most pronounced, they are supernatural, but there are horrors enough in real life to go around. Disease, war and famine. The four horseman are as deadly and as present as ever. Perhaps it is these horrors we wish to escape in the pages of fictional ones.
In the ‘controlled’ context of a page, we can visit the dark stay and stay as long as we dare. We have only to look up to see the comfortable room around us to find security again, even if we see the colors are now a little darker than we remember them.
There’s an adage I know that compares one’s life to a tapestry. The dark threads are as important as the light ones in defining who we are. So too I believe is life and reality. Thus, dark fiction has its adherents rightfully so.
We can choose to shelter ourselves behind happy endings and uplifting fantasy, make a true escape from the world, or we can seize the darkness and make it a part of us. We can understand and recognize the yin and yang of the universe. We can celebrate the decay as we would growth, roil in fear to feel the life therein as acute as a joyful laugh. That is what dark fiction offers.