Alone (6 page)
“Mr. Miller, I’m going to ask you a few things. Things that there’s no way I should know about. I just want you to answer me honestly, okay?”
Dan nodded.
“You said that you broke the Kresby’s big picture window. Well, shortly after you passed away—”
“But I’m not dead.”
“Just listen,” she soothed. “Please?”
“Okay.” Dan nodded. “Sorry. I’m just upset.”
“That’s okay. Anyway, shortly after you passed away, the Kresby’s window was broken. It happened while they were watching TV. Nobody knew how it happened. The weather was nice. Sunny. No clouds or hail or anything like that. There weren’t any kids running around outside or anything like that. It just ... shattered.”
“When I broke it,” Dan said, “there was nobody inside the house. The television wasn’t on. There’s no electricity.”
“Are you sure no one was home?”
“I ... yes. Sort of. I thought I heard Susan scream, just for a second, but there was nobody there.”
“A few months after that,” Maria said, “Jerry told my Mom that he was afraid somebody had broken into your house. He called the cops and everything. Apparently, he woke up one morning and found ink stains all over his wallet. He also found some on Danielle’s pillow. They were smudged, like fingerprints, but the cops were never able to get anything concrete from them. Do you know anything about that?”
Ink stains. Dan remembered the pen breaking in his grip, and how he’d smudged Jerry’s wallet and Danielle’s pillow when he was looking for them.
“Mr. Miller?”
He tried to speak, but there was a knot in his throat. Instead, he closed his eyes and nodded.
“A few months after that,” Maria continued, “Danielle said she saw you. She broke down at school and they made Jerry come pick her up, and when she got home, she told him that she saw your ghost. It worried Jerry enough that he took her to see a child counselor. But the counselor said it was just her dealing with her grief and expressing it through a fantasy outlet, and it didn’t happen again.”
“I saw her,” Dan whispered. “Upstairs, in her room. I saw Danielle. She was a ghost.”
“No,” Maria said. “She wasn’t the ghost. You were.”
“But ... but that’s ... how?”
“I don’t know. You died in your sleep a little over a year ago, Mr. Miller. Don’t you remember anything about what happened?”
“I went to sleep. When I woke up, Jerry and Danielle were gone. The house was empty. The power and the utilities were off. And everything ... everything tasted funny. Even the sound seemed off. Not off like the power, but different. You know what I mean?”
“I’ve noticed the sound is different here,” Maria agreed.
“But where is here? Where are we? We’re in my house. Everything looks the same. This isn’t Heaven or Hell. Not that I believe in those anyway.”
“I don’t know,” Maria said. “Maybe this is where you remained. Maybe you created it. Or maybe we see our homes when we die. Our immediate worlds. Because after I cut my wrists, I remember getting very cold and very sleepy. When I woke up, I was dead, but still in my room. When I came outside, I saw you. How far have you explored over the last year?”
“It hasn’t been a year,” Dan insisted. “I’m telling you, I’ve only been here for a few days.”
“Maybe time is different here? Maybe what only felt like a few days here, was a lot longer back where we ... well, you know.”
“There’s nothing out there,” Dan said. “Nothing beyond the mist.”
“Did you go into it?”
He nodded. “A little bit. But there’s nothing there.”
“Maybe our memories only keep our immediate surroundings in place. Maybe everything else vanishes.”
“Well then, what about that thing out there? What the hell is it?”
“I don’t know,” Maria said, “but I do know that I wasn’t afraid of it. I don’t think it meant us any harm. I felt very calm when it came toward us.”
“Calm? Jesus Christ, I was terrified of it.”
“Do you know why?”
“No. Do you?”
“No,” Maria admitted. “Maybe it’s because you didn’t realize you were dead.”
“But what does it want? What is it?”
“Maybe it’s here to help us. To guide us somehow.”
“How can you know for sure?”
Maria shrugged. “I don’t. But I feel things. In the last few minutes, ever since waking up after I died—I feel things that are true. Things I didn’t know before.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m not sure I do, either. But I feel them anyway. I bet you can, too.”
“All I felt was scared. There were no universal truths revealed to me. All this time, all that I’ve felt is alone.”
“Maybe you weren’t ready yet. After all, you didn’t know what you were until now.”
“I still don’t! How can I be dead? How can—”
Dan was interrupted by a knock at the door. Unlike the rest of the sounds, the knock was deep and loud. Two more followed, each one powerful and insistent.
“Oh God,” Dan moaned. “It’s the shadow. I know it is.”
“It’s okay,” Maria said. “You don’t have to be afraid of it. Stop for a moment and think about it. Let yourself feel.”
Dan took a deep breath and did as she asked. He was surprised to discover that Maria was right. That sense of foreboding that had come over him every time the shadow drew near was now gone. Instead, he felt a strange sense of comfort and peace.
“What do we do now?” he whispered.
Maria stood up and smiling, took his hand. “Let’s open the door.”
They did, and the figure was there to greet them. It made a sweeping gesture with one large hand, indicating the direction they should go. Maria stepped forward eagerly. After a moment’s hesitation, Dan followed. The shadow walked between them, and when it took their hands in its own, Dan was no longer afraid.
Around them, the mists dissipated and the gray turned to light. The skies above burned with dark shades of orange and red and yellow, and the light grew brighter, illuminating them.
“Where are we going?” Dan asked. “Where is it taking us?”
“To the next place.”
“And where is that?”
Maria smiled. “Let’s find out together, Mr. Miller.”
Dan shielded his eyes with his free hand as the dazzling light consumed them, enfolding them in its radiance.
And then, he was no longer alone.
AFTERWORD
Spoiler Warning: If you are one of those people who skip to the end of the book before you read the story, stop now. The following anecdote contains major spoilers and will ruin your enjoyment of this novella.
Seriously. Stop reading. Go back to the beginning of the book.
I mean it. Get the hell out of here.
Okay, are they gone?
Good. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Alone.
Alone
has been sitting inside my head for over a decade now. The idea came from a conversation I had with noted critic and genre scholar Jack Haringa many years ago at some long-forgotten horror convention. We were discussing Fredric Brown’s infamous short story, “Knock”. If you’re not familiar with the tale, “Knock” was quite famous in its time for being the shortest science fiction story ever written. The original version went like this:
The last man on earth sat in his room. There was a knock at the door.
That’s it. Two sentences. Short and sweet, and packing one hell of a punch. But then, at the urging of his peers, Brown continued the story, elaborating on those first two sentences. He further developed the plot and the character. The last man turned out to be named Walter Phelan, and the entity knocking on his door was an alien known as Zan, who had killed off everyone else on Earth and wanted to put Walter in a cosmic zoo (along with the planet’s last woman, Grace).
I told Jack that I thought the story would have worked better had the author just stuck to those first two sentences, because I thought the whole alien zoo thing was silly. I thought it was silly because I’d seen it done in the Marvel and DC comics of my youth, and I was young enough, stupid enough, and conceited enough not to understand that those Marvel and DC comics were riffing on Brown, who had done it first. (I know better now, because I am old).
Jack asked me what I would have done differently, were I to continue the story from those first two lines. Before I could answer him, we were interrupted by Jack Ketchum, who had a bottle of Dewar’s whiskey that he needed help drinking, and then both Jacks got very drunk and began hollering at me about my incorrect usage of the semi-colon (which many people do, and not always when they are drunk), and I never did get the chance to tell Jack Haringa what I would have done differently with the story.
So I wrote this instead.
Alone
is what I would have done differently.
I still think Brown would have been better off sticking with just the original two sentences. Although I do not know for certain, I would hazard a guess that he found expanding upon them to be a challenge. I know that I sure did.
Alone
wasn’t an easy novella to write. Once I got past the initial plot—Dan wakes up alone and finds out that he’s the last man on Earth—it was hard to balance the discovery portions of the plot in a way that a) wouldn’t give away the fact that he’s dead and b) wouldn’t drag the story down to a tedious snail’s pace. It was extremely difficult to juggle the plot and sustain the narrative in a way that served both the story and the reader.
An aside: when
The Sixth Sense
was first released to movie theatres, authors Rain Graves and Geoff Cooper went to see it together. Ten minutes into the movie, Coop turned to Rainy and said, “Bruce Willis is a ghost. I’m going outside to smoke. See you when the movie is done.” With
Alone
, the main thing I wanted to avoid was you, the reader, having the same realization with this novella that Coop had with the film. Hopefully, I succeeded. If not ... well, I did my best. That’s all any writer can do.
An early draft of
Alone
, written several years ago, introduced the Grim Reaper as a character during the second chapter. I scrapped that version, and in hindsight, I’m glad I did. It was the work of a younger writer who wanted to rush ahead and get to the spot where he could shout, “Boo! I got you readers! Dan is a ghost! He’s been dead this whole time! M. Night Shyamalan’s got nothing on me.” Maria appeared much earlier in that draft, as well, and much of the novella involved her and Dan trying to escape the Reaper, who was very angry that they were refusing to move on to the next level of existence.
I like this quiet, stripped down, acoustic version better. I hope you did, too.
Brian Keene
April 2011
BRIAN KEENE is the author of over twenty-five books, including
Darkness on the Edge of Town, Take The Long Way Home, Urban Gothic, Castaways
,
Kill Whitey
,
Dark Hollow
,
Dead Sea,
and
The Rising
. He’s also written comic books such as
The Last Zombie, Doom Patrol
and
Dead of Night: Devil Slayer
. His work has been translated into German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, French and Taiwanese. Several of his novels and stories have been developed for film, including
Ghoul
and
The Ties That Bind
. In addition to writing, Keene also oversees Maelstrom, his own small press publishing imprint specializing in collectible limited editions, via Thunderstorm Books. Keene’s work has been praised in such diverse places as
The New York Times
, The History Channel, The Howard Stern Show, CNN.com,
Publisher’s Weekly,
Media Bistro,
Fangoria Magazine
, and
Rue Morgue Magazine
. Keene lives in Pennsylvania. You can communicate with him online at
www.briankeene.com
, on
Facebook
or on
Twitter
.
View more of Brian’s work in the
Kobo Store
.
Also by Brian Keene
Clickers II: The Next Wave
(with J.F. Gonzalez)
Clickers III: Dagon Rising
(with J.F. Gonzalez)
The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham
(with Nick Mamatas)
Continue reading for an excerpt from Robert Swartwood’s thriller
Man of Wax
