Book of Dark #1: Always Stand Up, Page 2

  Chapter 1

  One of Those Dreams

  Keane sat bolt upright in bed, panting, sweating, and generally upset that his hands were glowing again.

  It was a neon green sort of glow. The kind that desolate signs on lonely street corners often rhythmically blasted into the late night. The kind that Keane was, unfortunately, all too familiar with.

  When he noticed that the entire dorm room was now awash in the emerald emission from his hands, he went into a silent panic and tried to shake it off. But this made the shadows he was already casting on the walls dance around like ghostly apparitions. So, he stopped.

  He should have known better, really; it wasn’t the first time that this had happened and, though he didn’t know it then, it certainly wasn’t going to be the last.

  Something had to be done about the sickly-looking green hands, though. As the lanky, pimple-faced fourteen year old resident of dorm 5D at the St. Martin’s Orphanage for Boys, Keane had the misfortune of sharing his room with five other pubescent boys, and he knew just how cruel they could be to even the slightest aberration. And, at this stage, his hands were beyond aberrations. They were full-on abominations.

  He concealed the luminous appendages under his flimsy blanket. This turned out to be a mistake, as the cheap fabric acted like a lamp shade and projected the light to the far corners of the room, much like a lighthouse would illuminate the dark seas. He gasped, he fumbled, and, panicking anew, he pulled his hands back into the open.

  In a moment of sheer desperation, he wondered if sticking them down his pajama bottoms would work. Fortunately, the moment was brief, and he soon came to his senses—if luminous hands alone could earn him hideous nicknames such as ‘K’neon’ and ‘Keenward Bulbhands’, he didn’t even want to imagine what would result from getting caught with what looked like glow sticks down his pants.

  Dorm 5D was so small a room that it finished almost as soon as it started, and yet somehow managed to contain three bunk beds, a book shelf, and a writing desk too.

  The orphanage’s Board members, in their infinite wisdom—or, more accurately, their helpless predicament—had decided to fit each room with six beds, though the original plans allowed for only four.

  So, they’d called in some cheap and cheerful (which just meant bad—really bad) carpenters to lop a few inches off the sides of every bunk. Unsurprisingly, the carpenters had made a hash of it. They had somehow managed to make the already rickety beds even less stable. Worse still, their work had made the process of sleeping in the bunks akin to mummification. Any movement was almost impossible, which annoyed just about every kid that Keane knew. It didn’t bother him so much, though, since it beat sleeping out in the streets. Just about anything did, really.

  Keane’s bed was the bottom half of the bunk closest to the entrance. Keane liked this because it made for quick getaways when trouble arose, which tended to be often.

  Peering past the writing desk and into the bunk to his left, Keane saw that AJ and Mark were fast asleep. He could hear them snoring away in their bunks. Then, craning his neck even higher, he looked into the third bunk, the one pushed up against the far wall of the room, and saw that the younger boys, Warren and Andrew, were also deep in slumber. He exhaled with relief.

  But his respite was short-lived. Someone was awake. He could sense it…

  A dull thud shook the floor, and Keane immediately recognized the silhouette of Brok as it landed face-first on the floor next to him.

  While this sounded painful, Keane wasn’t worried, since Brok, longstanding occupant of the bed above his, often elected to dismount this way. What did concern him was his bunkmate waking up all the other occupants of dorm 5D.

  “Huh? What happened? Who’s there?” Brok boomed.

  The boy claimed to be fourteen, just like Keane, but was about half a foot shorter and, unbelievably, even skinnier.

  Given the size discrepancy, Keane often wondered whether Brok lied about his age or, worryingly, didn’t actually know his age or, worse still, didn’t quite understand the concept of age. Knowing Brok, who would often spell his own four-letter name incorrectly, any of these options was possible. Right now, though, what concerned Keane most was how loud the boy was being.

  “Brok! Shhh!” he whispered urgently.

  He was glad that Brok was carrying his flashlight, the least he could do after the hour long lecture on bully survival techniques that Keane had laid upon him the night before. According to Keane, a simple flashlight was the perfect anti-bully tool. It could help see assaulters in the dark. It could temporarily blind them, which helped with the evasion effort that followed. And then there was the option of using it as a weapon—a quick whack on the head with the rear end usually did the trick.

  “I demand answers, dammit!” Brok told the darkness, his eyes not quite open yet. He blindly fumbled with his torch and ended up inadvertently switching it on straight into Keane’s face.

  “Brok, no!” said Keane, throwing his hands up to shield his eyes. “Please! You’ll wake them all!”

  “Keane?” said Brok, his peepers finally adjusting to the dark, his brain to the situation. “Keane! Are you okay? Did they get you? Who was they? I’ll get ’em back for you, Keane! I’ll get ’em good!” Brok shook his fists at no one in particular.

  “Hush, Brok! It’s nothing. I just… I had one of those dreams.”

  “Dreams?” said Brok, as though he were hearing the word for the first time in his life. “What dreams?”

  “You know—one of those dreams…”

  Brok was instantly quieter. “Oh. Again, huh? Well, that just su-hucks.”

  He turned off the flashlight, but lingered by Keane’s side. It was his way of showing concern which, despite the awkwardness, Keane did appreciate. After all, Brok was his best friend in the entire world. Also, his only friend.

  They’d started hanging out when Brok transferred to the orphanage from… well, he refused to say. He also refused to say anything about what he did before this, or why he’d been transferred, or anything at all about his life prior to St. Martin’s, really.

  Keane didn’t mind this, though, since he wasn’t exactly eager to divulge the details of his past either.

  In fact, as a general rule, all topics that involved feelings, emotions, and such other ‘wishy-washy airy-fairy stuff’ (Brok’s words, which Keane had heartily agreed with and, subsequently, adopted) remained strictly off limits—a big, fat nope. The rule had worked well so far, and there was no point rocking the boat on that front.

  Out of nowhere, Brok shoved a paper bag at Keane.

  “Popcorn?”

  “Huh? What? No!” cried Keane, startled as much by the sudden smell of salt and butter as Brok’s thrusting action. “Why do you even have that in bed?”

  Brok shrugged and chucked a handful of popped kernels down his throat.

  “I hope this doesn’t mean your powers will re-activate,” said Brok, chewing and talking at the same time. “Because the last time you had one of those dreams…” In went another handful, and Brok paused to chew.

  Keane waited.

  Watching the boy masticate was disturbing, not in the least because of the debris flying every which way from his mouth—but Keane waited. And waited.

  Eventually, he snapped. “They reacti—?”

  “They reactivated, Keane!” Brok rushed to cut him off, splattering him with spit-infused flecks of popcorn.

  As Keane swept the white flecks off his face, he looked away, knowing that he was guilty as charged.

  The truth was that, although the fluorescent hands were an embarrassing problem, Keane saw nothing wrong with putting the powers that came with them to good use.

  And yes, it was true that he didn’t have the best track record when it came to actually using them, but that wouldn’t be the case if Brok would just let him practice…

  “Keane?” said Brok, sounding like an accusatory mother trying to squeeze a confession out of her lying child.


  “Brok, look—”

  “Nope!”

  “Listen!”

  “Nuh-uh!”

  “The powers reactivating could be a good thing.”

  “No suh-ree!”

  “It could really help us out in school, what with Randy and his—”

  “Never!”

  “But Brok—”

  Brok wagged a finger at Keane. “Don’t you dare ‘But Brok’ me! Not after what happened the last time…”

  “Won’t you at least just… think about it?”

  “Look, Keane,” implored Brok, “instead of yet again going through that world of that pain we’ve been through oh-I-dunno a jillion-billion times already, how about, you know, not doing that again?”

  Keane’s eyes narrowed; words were not Brok’s forte.

  But both boys froze in place when AJ, disturbed by Brok’s climbing volume, stirred in his bed. Only their eyes slowly rotated to better see the boy who’d started to mutter something about a pet multi-mutant-monkey-lizard-snake, and how it would devour every person and thing that got in its way once he unleashed it, and how the world was doomed to bow to him when it saw the devastation his pet could inflict. He wore an evil grin throughout his monologue. Then he rolled over and fell silent again.

  Brok relaxed and turned back, but Keane was still gawking in shock at the sleep-talking maniac he had the misfortune of sharing a room with.

  “Come on, Keane,” said Brok. “Every single time you’ve used those powers of yours, things have backfired. Every. Single. Time!”

  Keane sighed. “Fine…” He hated it when Brok was right. And this time, Brok was right.

  “No, say it!” insisted Brok, getting loud again. “Say ‘In the event that my powers shall herein reactivate; I, Keane, of unsound mind and even unsounder body—’”

  “Shhh! Alright! Okay! I won’t.”

  “Promise me!” Brok insisted.

  Keane crossed his arms in a huff. “I promise. Okay?”

  Brok studied Keane, narrowing his eyes and rubbing his chin. He was clearly not buying it, and with good reason too: Keane’s face was only too openly exhibiting just how much he did not want to comply.

  Keane remained silent, pursing his lips while he dodged Brok’s scrutinizing stare.

  But the next moment Brok’s face was ablaze with a smile wider than his jaw itself, and he’d thrusted a thumbs-up gesture to within a hair’s width of Keane’s nose.

  Keane frowned with bewilderment as he watched Brok’s feet vanish back over the edge of the bed, but was also glad that at least his bunkmate seemed satisfied that the promise would be kept. Keane himself wasn’t so sure.

  With a resigned sigh, he started to settle under the covers as well… until Brok’s upside-down head appeared over the edge of the top bunk and scared him to half to death, that is. Keane clasped his mouth shut to muffle his scream.

  “Brok! What the—” But he trailed off when he saw Brok’s little face looking down at him with uncharacteristic earnestness.

  “You okay?” Brok asked.

  And given the embargo on ‘wishy-washy airy-fairy stuff’, he needed say no more for Keane to know just how heart-felt his concern was.

  Keane was, needless to say, not okay.

  How could he be after the dream he’d just had? A dream that had so violently jolted him awake that he found himself still reeling from it?

  But he nodded, deciding that, for now at least, he needed some time to think about it all.

  “You sure?” asked Brok.

  Keane bobbed his head up and down some more and even managed to muster a weak smile.

  “M-kay!” said Brok, his head vanishing out of sight as suddenly as it had appeared.

  Keane knew that he would, of course, tell Brok everything eventually. He always did. But for now, he really did have some thinking to do. A dream like the one he’d just woken from had to have a deep meaning, an innate significance, and Keane needed to figure out exactly what that was before he could talk about it.

  He fluffed up his pillow—as much as one could fluff up an object nearly as hard as rock—and lay back in bed.

  “Just so you know,” added Brok. “Your hands are doing that thing again.”

  “I know.”

  Keane looked down at the pallid emission and was filled with dread again as the panic from earlier reasserted itself.

  “Okay. Just so you know.”

  “I-I know,” said Keane, suppressing the hyperventilation. Dread, dread, dread.

  He desperately looked around the room trying to find something—anything—that would cover up the glow, at least until the morning, by which time things would have reverted of their own accord. At least that’s what past experience had taught him.

  Search as he might, though, he was unable to find anything suitable other than his torturously uncomfortable pillow. So, he gave up and buried his hands under the semi-solid lump, bracing for a night of pain and fully expecting bruised hands in the morning.

  As he settled in, he looked past Warren and Andrew’s bunk and spotted a pair of stars shining through the gap in the curtains. He stared absently at them, knowing full well that no more sleep was coming tonight. His Idiot Brain wanted to dwell on the dream instead.

  What surprised him about this particular dream was that he actually remembered most of it, which was uncommon because his memory was bad. Very bad. Appalling, actually.

  It was a problem that had plagued him since he was a little boy. Days passed him by like water running through a sieve, and if he managed to retain even a few drops, he considered himself lucky. Events tended to get mixed up, dates got jumbled, and names too.

  So, when he found that he could recall almost every minute detail of the dream he’d just had, he was nothing short of astonished. It occurred to him that he might have had this exact dream a long, long time ago, which could have had something to do with the better-than-usual recall, but, of course, he couldn’t be sure.

  It also occurred to him that the term ‘dream’ might not be the most accurate description of what he’d experienced, given the effect it’d had on him, and that, perhaps, the term nightmare might be more accurate.

  But it had started off so very gently…