Dark World

DARK WORLD

  by

  Russell C. Connor

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  * * * * *

  Howling Days

  The Jackal Man

  Race the Night

  Whitney

  Outside the Lines (Novella)

  Dark World (Novellette)

  Coming in 2012: Finding Misery

  * * * * *

  Dark World copyright ©2011 by Russell C. Connor

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review, or as provided by U.S. Copyright Law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  * * * * *

  It was Kylie’s new habit of calling for water in the middle of the night that first led Harold to discover the other world in his living room.

  The girl was five, all set to start school next year with ‘the big kids,’ but suddenly she couldn’t make it through eight hours of sleep without a few gulps of lukewarm bathroom tap water, like she’d developed a set of gills. They’d tried leaving a glass beside the bed, but she insisted she needed it fresh. At first, he and Liz had alternated nights for this chore, but she made such a production of it when her turn came—throwing back the covers angrily, muttering that the girl must be part camel (a comment that really didn’t make much sense anyway, when you stopped to think about it)—that Harold had taken over the duty on a full-time basis.

  Secretly, he thought it was adorable.

  But on the night Harold first crossed over into Dark World—as he would come to call it—Kylie’s voice summoned him from the depths of a deep, dead sleep, and a dream where Liz had the body of a young Julia Roberts. In it, they made love at the foot of the bed with a fervor his wife had never possessed in waking life.

  He sat up, peeling the lids away from swollen eyes enough to see the dim bedroom. Liz lay on her stomach beside him in a shaft of moonlight, arm over her face, breath like a whisper. The glowing digital clock on the nightstand read 1:30 over the curve of her bare shoulder.

  “Daddeee!” The voice drifted from the other side of the house, muffled by several walls. “I need a glass of waaaater!” Always like that, emphasis on the waaaa.

  “Harold, go get her some damn water!” Liz groused, without stirring. “I have a long day tomorrow and I don’t need this!”

  Long day. It seemed Liz’ life was nothing but long days lately. And ‘I don’t need this’? That had been her catchphrase for longer than he could remember. A spark of annoyance shot through him, like a blazing ball from a Roman candle firework.

  Harold stumbled out of bed and into the master bathroom. He grabbed the plastic glass he now set on their counter each night before going to bed, and filled it only half way. No need to give the girl too much; if Liz had to start washing urine-stained sheets, he would never hear the end of it. Then he opened the bedroom door and started across the living room.

  It was utterly pitch out here at night. The small bit of moonlight that managed to trickle under the porch overhang and through the windows at the front of the house was cut off by a partition wall that divided the den from the dining room. Even the slight illumination from the bedroom windows behind him didn’t reach very far, resulting in a darkness that grew deeper toward the left half of the room, particularly the far corner, too much for the eyes to ever adjust to. The effect was like a stygian cave.

  He didn’t need light, however. They’d lived in this house for eight years—the first place he and Liz bought, the year after their wedding—and he could navigate so well by the map in his head that he kept his eyes closed for most of this trip.

  Harold inched his way forward with the glass of water, half his brain still asleep, only the barest thread of consciousness directing him. If he kept this careful balance, stayed in that queer land between waking and slumbering, he could slip into bed and fall right back to sleep. He should be passing between the television on the far wall to his left and a leather recliner on his right. Any second now, if he wasn’t careful, he would bang his shin on that low coffee table Liz picked out at IKEA. He could usually find it with his toe and then turn right, lined up perfectly to pass through the dining room and into the hallway leading to Kylie’s bedroom.

  Except the coffee table wasn’t there.

  He’d taken a handful of half-steps from the door of the bedroom already. Harold surrendered and opened his eyes all the way, straining for any scrap of light with which to get his bearings, but the darkness around him was absolute.

  Had Liz moved the damn thing? He could swear it was there when he went to bed. Of course it had been; hadn’t he picked up his empty beer bottle from it after turning off the TV? His bleary head had just gotten him off course, and he’d passed to the side of it in the dark.

  Harold continued forward with his free hand outstretched, seeking the couch or, missing that also, the back wall of the den as a new reference point. He could walk faster and easier now, knowing there was nothing to trip on. Any second he would feel it…any second now…

  Nothing.

  The entire stretch of the den couldn’t be more than twenty-five feet. He’d taken more steps than that; maybe covered more area than the entire width of their little house on Meisner Street could possibly encompass. Harold turned in a disoriented circle, unable to see even the bedroom door he’d just come from, and wishing he’d just flicked the light switch on his way through. Lost in his own living room. That was one for the record books. He wasn’t scared yet—oh no, that would be utterly silly, this was just a little sleepy confusion, nothing that wouldn’t be forgotten in the morning—but the dial on his inner emotional thermostat was definitely heading toward panic.

  He took another few steps, no longer sure what direction he was headed.

  His foot came down on something that was not carpet.

  He paused. The new surface under his toes was cool and smooth, like moist earth, but it seemed to move, to…to squiggle, was the word his mind jumped to, as if not entirely stable. It reminded him of the Halloween games they used to play as kids, games Kylie would be old enough for soon, where you made your friends mash their hands down into a big bowl of Jell-o and told them it was cow brains. He swept the sole of his foot back and forth and encountered crunchy, dead foliage.

  At that point, Harold stopped relying totally on his eyes for input and opened all his senses up, like a blind person, and realized he was no longer indoors.

  His ears detected none of the barely perceptible echoes that told the brain there was a roof over its head. The space around him was large and open, but still lacking any light source. It was full of other sounds though, both close and distant, ticks and pings and chirrups, the phonic indicators of life. As he stood there, an honest-to-God wind blew across his skin, warm and heavy…and brought a stink of something long dead and rotting.

  His breath caught. He was dreaming. Had to be.

  To his left, something moved.

  It was a burst of scuttling, the same noise one hears when disturbing small creatures in woodland underbrush, as the rabbit or frog or what
ever it is tries to decide if full-out flight is required. But something about it was so intricate—so starkly real—that he knew without a doubt he wasn’t dreaming. That little needle in his brain shot right past panic and into dread.

  I sleepwalked, he thought. Walked right out of the house and into—

  Into what? The jungle around the corner?

  He shook his head. If he was truly outside, what kind of place was this pitch black, even at night? There was no moonlight, no stars, nothing.

  That scuttling sound circled around him from his left, as though evaluating. Harold spun to follow it, trying to swallow the acid ball in his throat. He had no idea where to go or what to do, but his skin was crawling.

  “Daddeeee! Where ARE you?”

  Kylie’s voice floated to him from somewhere on his right. It sounded far away and muffled, but the security it offered was like a fishhook in his brain, reeling him in.

  He moved toward it quickly. His ears (or maybe his imagination) told him that whatever was here lunged after him and missed by inches. That foliage crunched underfoot. He tried to cry out, desperate to hear the anchor of his daughter’s voice once more, but no sound made it past his clamped throat.

  Harold felt carpet between his toes, and a split second later he did fetch his shin up against the coffee table. He flew over it, only staying on his feet through sheer luck, and tried to get his bearings. Ahead, the darkness around him lessened in degrees, going from pitch black to a gray blur; somehow, he’d reentered the living room from the farthest corner, where no light could reach. He hit the wall beside the hallway and felt for the bank of switches on this side of the room.

  The bulbs under the ceiling fan came on, blazing light in all directions, driving that darkness away like a bulldozer shoveling a mound of dirt. He turned on the ones for the hall and the end table reading lamps also, then checked over his shoulder.

  His familiar living room stood there as it always had, comfortable walls enclosing a very finite space. He blinked around at it, panting for breath.

  From the open doorway of the bedroom came, “Christ Harold, shut the damn lights off!”

  “S-sorry,” he called, but didn’t do as she asked. Not yet. He was drenched in sweat, and below the waist his pajama bottoms clung to him in a huge wet patch down one leg. He thought his bladder might’ve let go, until he realized the water glass he still clutched had spilled in his run.

  “Harold!” Liz shouted.

  He stepped around the corner as far as he could, reached back, then flicked the switch and moved quickly down the hall.

  The Eeyore nightlight in Kylie’s room was a welcome sight. His daughter was sitting up in bed, watching him with huge eyes. He sat down on the bedside and handed her the glass.

  “Daddy, that’s not enough!”

  “Drink that and I’ll get you more if you need it,” Harold said, twisting so he could see out the door of Kylie’s room. Darkness reclaimed territory on the far side of the threshold, where Eeyore’s feeble rays couldn’t reach.

  Was it real? Had it actually happened? Even now, it seemed far away and blurry, like the details of a half-forgotten dream, but the fear of whatever that place had been was still very much with him. If the girl needed more water, he might be able to make it to the guest bathroom down the hall, but he doubted he could force himself to go back through the living room until the safe light of day helped sort this out.

  Oh, this is a fine state of affairs. Forty-two years old and scared of the dark. You better not let Liz find out, buddy boy.

  He took the glass from his daughter—the child he had wanted for so long and had just about given up on ever having—and stretched out beside her small frame.

  “Daddy’s gonna sleep here, pumpkin.”

  “How come?”

  Because there’s a forest in our living room. “I’m too tired to go back.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Her voice suggested even she didn’t see the logic in this. The girl slumped against him. “Ew, you’re all wet!”

  “I know. Go to sleep, Kylie.”

  She passed out in seconds, but Harold’s eyes were still open when sunlight filtered through the room’s only window.

  * * *

  If Harold had ever been asked if he and Liz had a happy marriage, he would’ve answered ‘yes’ without a moment’s hesitation.

  If he’d ever really stopped to consider the question, even just for his own piece of mind, he might be forced to admit that he had no idea what a ‘happy marriage’ was. Deep down, he didn’t think anybody did.

  They’d never been a couple openly in love, not in the Hallmark-card, pet-names, kissing-in-public sense of the phrase. And if there had ever been passion between them, it was but a brief spark when they met, Harold at 34, Liz a year younger, both well past the age where such fantasies can be indulged. They’d met at a mutual friend’s New Year’s Eve party, been paired together out of necessity for an awkward kiss at midnight, and ended up having brusque sex at her cramped apartment two weeks later. Their union was one of functionality and an unspoken fear of being alone, the only commonality they shared a desperate desire to have children.

  An early miscarriage had crushed them both. They’d already named the child by the time it died: Samuel, after his grandfather. With Sam out of the picture, something had seemed to wither between them, but they kept trying, the sex almost mechanical, like two robots programmed for procreation.

  Then Kylie had come into the world, and everything changed. At least, for Harold it had. He had expected the arrival of a child to wake them up out of their funks, and that’s exactly how it felt for him, Rip van Winkle returning to life after a decade-long nap, but their daughter just hadn’t seemed to thrill Liz in the same way. He’d always secretly wondered if the loss of Sam hadn’t soured her on motherhood completely.

  “Thanks for the wake-up call last night.” She tossed a plate of toaster waffles down in front of him the next morning. “Maybe you can route a parade through the bedroom tonight.”

  “I couldn’t see,” Harold mumbled. “I banged my shin on the table. Got a bruise as big as an apple. Can I have the syrup?”

  “You don’t need any syrup. Too much sugar.” This was the first he’d heard of the too-much-sugar law, leading him to believe this was a punishment. Her lip curled as she slammed the refrigerator door. “You never needed the light on before. I mean, Jesus Harold, I really don’t need this.”

  He wanted to defend himself, but knew it would do no good. Judging from her tone, it would only start a fight. And he was too afraid that an argument would lead to the true source of last night’s disturbance, and that wasn’t something he could deal with just yet.

  Kylie bounced into the kitchen dressed in the clothes he’d laid out for, hair pulled back in a ponytail. She climbed into the chair next to Harold and announced, “Morning!”

  “Morning, pumpkin.”

  “Don’t ‘morning-pumpkin’ her,” Liz snapped. She put their daughter’s breakfast on the table, along with the syrup he’d been denied. “I’m sure you kept her up half the night with all that noise. And sleeping in her room, what was that about?”

  He shrugged. The feel of that foreign soil beneath his toes was still with him. The first thing he’d done this morning—after making sure Liz was in the shower, of course—was walk the perimeter of the entire living room. He had no idea what he expected to find (a gaping hole in the side of the house? A glowing portal?) but he knew what he had found: nothing besides a few smudges of what looked like mud on the periphery of the room beside their entertainment center, far outside the normal lanes of foot traffic. He pinched it between both fingers, smelled it, but couldn’t determine if it was proof of his nocturnal adventure or just some missed vacuuming.

  Liz was still watching him with hands on hips, waiting for an answer.

  Kylie saved him. “It’s okay, Mommy, I like Daddy being there!”

  She fixed the girl with a flashfreezing stare. “Finish eating
.”

  * * *

  Lack of sleep made Harold’s workday a nightmare. His mind kept straying to those sensations from the middle of the night, the smells and sounds from that other place. Mostly he just wanted to forget, pretend the whole thing never happened. That had been his answer to a lot of problems in life though—especially the ones concerning his marriage.

  He tried calling Liz’ cell around midday, and got her voicemail. He could almost never get her during the day. At three, he left the office to pick up Kylie at day care. They went home, and while Kylie changed clothes, Harold stood in the middle of the living room and studied the empty far corner. He turned off all the lights, but there was still too much sun from the rest of the house to recreate the soupy murk that reigned in here after the sun went down. The texture of the walls stood out in rough patches to his tired eyes.

  Kylie came out and plopped down in front of the television to watch cartoons.

  “Honey, Daddy’s gonna lay down for just a little bit before he starts dinner.”

  “Can we have mac and cheese?”

  “Maybe.” He kissed the top of her head. “Stay right here and watch TV and…and leave all the lights on, okay?”

  “Okay!”

  In the bedroom, he changed into a t-shirt and shorts. Liz worked late just about every day lately, so he had time for a nap before she got home.

  Harold sat on the edge of the bed and reached to set the bedside clock, holding down the button that displayed the currently set alarm time.

  The clock had always been on Liz’ side of the bed, for as long as they’d been married. He couldn’t even remember how it started. Certainly not with a conscious decision, but rather one of those random quirks that quickly evolves into marital law through routine. She set it, got out of bed before him in the morning, and then gave a shout—or in recent months, a grunt—when she was finished in the bathroom, so he could start getting ready. Once upon a time, they’d showered together, but those days were long gone.