I felt my feet leave the ground. Zero-G.
He slammed my back into another cabinet, leaning close, his grinning, blood-soaked face glowing bright in the moonlight. Glass shards glittered in his cheeks, his chin. One flashed from his gums, bathing his teeth in a gushing stream of blood.
He shoved again, sending my back into the cabinet. The dishes inside clattered, cheering for more destruction.
“KILL YOU,” Daniel roared.
And then I was airborne, heaved in a one-eighty, a boneless scarecrow in free fall… and now, my body collided with the kitchen table, smashing through it, finally impacting on the floor. Plates and beer cans shattered and clanked around my face. The skillet bonged, bouncing across the linoleum, landing near my arm.
Stars filled the room. Blood filled my mouth.
Daniel was relentless. He crouched low. His fist smashed against my face. I cried out, asking him to stop, no, I didn’t want to die in the dark. The world rocked as he punched me again.
My hand groped in the darkness, searching for the skillet. Daniel saw this and kicked it away. It clanged against a wall, out of reach.
My fingers still crawled forward, grasping nothing…
The wet crunch of knuckle blasted through my skull.
…grasping air…
Daniel was wheezing. The shadows on the ceiling were laughing in the dimness. Tktktk.
…grasping the hatchet’s handle.
I let loose a war cry and swung the thing. It was unbalanced and heavy in my hand. The blade whooshed in the darkness for a breathless eternity, and then sank home in Daniel Drake’s shin. The room filled with a nasty thock sound.
He staggered, his back striking the sink cabinet. I heard him tug the axe from his leg—the sound of tearing wet lettuce—and he was screaming now, screaming loud and long, like a child.
“You want… want to… KNOW MY FATHER” he shrieked.
His hands were tugging at something beside me—the frayed, filthy throw rug.
“HUH, gravedigger?! HUH? You want to KNOW him?! Go JOIN him!”
I stared dumbly as his finger snaked around a metal ring in the floor. I tried not to choke on my own blood, not to hear the skitter-scratches screaming in my ears.
Daniel opened the trapdoor.
“Be BURIED with him!” he screamed.
His boot crushed my side. He swung his fist. Another lightning bolt blasted across my eyes.
I felt my body being dragged slowly toward the hole in the floor. I struggled. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
I fell. The door slammed shut.
And the dark… began to speak.
26
The lizard part of my brain—the part hardwired for instinct and survival—ran the numbers and grunted a deduction. Cold ground beneath me. The overpowering, stale aroma of earth, dust, rat shit. Boards creaking less than two feet above my prone, bleeding body. Crawl space.
And that was my last rational thought for a while.
Blind. Blind like Richard Drake. Eyes open now, staring into the abyss, and yes, yes, it stared back at me, an ancient thing, a thing from before before, and I was sinking into its planet-sized onyx pupil, drowning in its inky aqueous humor, feeling my body pull into itself, crushed by the absence of light, warmth, sound, everything.
Everything… but the fear.
Fingers like rail spikes ripped at me, impossibly cold, burning my skin. Shrieks fell short in my throat; there was no air in which they could be heard. But my mind was alive with sounds: the marching of spider’s legs, the rising drone of locusts, the swirling scattering of autumn leaves—tktktkt—the roar of rockslides stones rattling in a clothes dryer, she tumbles and tumbles and now the soul-rending sound of a chuckle, the noise thunderclouds make as they collide and devour one another, growing fat and black for the storm to end all storms.
The Dark Man breathed. Panted, like a hungry dog. I imagined its forked tongue slick with crude-oil drool. It was omniscient. Omnipresent.
“Not… real,” I muttered.
But the shadow-chill slid over me, wrapped tight like a wetsuit, and I could feel the black, January lake water seeping through the membrane of my skin, full-body inoculation, a cure for life—life, the disease, the virus, the thing that must not be. It spoke back to me in its non-voice, a liquid language, sloshing affirmation in my inner ear: oh-so-real, tktktk, oh-so-mine… .
Certainty. This was where I would die. This was my grave. The grave for the meddler, the gravedigger, dead, dead’s dead, what’s dead’s buried, you’d be right to leave it alone.
Buried.
I rocked, weightless in the void, my mind seizing upon this. Join him, Daniel had said. Be buried with him. What did that mean?
Was Richard Drake’s body buried down—
I howled. The black stuff streamed into my eyes now, tears in reverse, piercing my ducts, turning my eyeballs into cold marbles.
—no no, focus, think of something else, Drake, yes, buried here? Then who’s the blind man in The Brink? Body in the crawl space… I need light, I need to see.
I screamed. Razor blades tearing beneath my fingernails now. I screamed again. Echoless.
no. no-tktktk-no-light-so-dark-no-light-now
No. No matches, no lighter, no flashlight in my satchel, nothing in the bag to beat away the
BZZZT.
What the f—
BZZZT.
This wasn’t happening. I wasn’t hearing that.
BZZZT.
I’d gone mad.
The black poured on in earnest now, slithering into my nose, tugging up my lips, squirting though my clenched teeth. I felt it surge through my pierced earlobes (Christ, I haven’t worn hoops in five yeaaaowww), the ink squirming through them like tapeworms.
My frozen hands fumbled to my satchel, to the buzzing thing inside—the impossible thing, no signal, no sender—my stupid fingers finally wrapping around Richard Drake’s cell phone. The cracked thing vibrated in my palm as I pulled out into the black, its LCD screen an impromptu flashlight, a beacon.
I read its screen, not daring to press it to my face, too frightened to listen. INCOMING CALL: SOPHRONIA POOLE. I held it high. The crawlspace came alive in its pale light—floorboards above, rotten earth beneath, limestone foundations. Three feet away, to my left: a crumpled, mold-soaked shoebox.
And there, looming near the box. Him.
It.
The Dark Man.
Picosecond glimpse
obsidian fire, shape of a man, crouching, depthless
Nothing made sense
shifting, intelligent, soundless black flames
anymore
torn paper, burned paper
Madness standing
electrified contortionist, jointless sea-snake limbs jigging, kicking wild
by the box
arms conducting palsied, unholy Butoh dance
It’s guarding
ice-pick fingers twitch-blur-tugging invisible upright bass strings
the box
head rocking side-to-side, gleeful mania, seesaw-seesaw, cheeks clapping against obsidian shoulders
So what’s
head of horns, head of vipers, head of smooth, polished stone
inside
faceless, but inside the nothing: beyond-black eyes… beyond- black teeth