The Dark Ones (5 page)

Then he saw her.

She was sitting on the porch of the old house, looking prim in a long skirt and a thick sweater. The attire was a far cry from the revealing outfits she’d favored around the office. He parked the Seville next to an old Buick Special that sat rusting on blocks in the center of the clearing, got out, and approached her warily.

“Damn, darlin’, why did you drag me out to this old dump?”

“Family property. It belonged to my grandfather, Frank Hollis. He died a long time ago.”

Hollis
.

Huh.

Now why did that name all of a sudden ring a dim bell? Something about it triggered a faint tingle of unease. There was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, an association lurking just beyond the limits of conscious memory.

Screw it.

It’d come to him later.

He nodded at the manila envelope clutched in her small hands. “Let me guess. Some of your dirty pictures. Ain’t nothin’ lower than a blackmailer. You know that, right?”

She came off the porch and approached him, stopping just a few feet away. “It doesn’t have to be like that. You can still do what needs doing.”

He scowled. “Once and for all, I ain’t killin’ my wife.” He snatched the envelope from her unresisting fingers and tore it open. His gut knotted up as he shuffled through the large black-and-white prints. “Oh, Lord . . .”

“Just copies, Norman. I have others hidden away. I needed you to see, so you’d know how serious I am.”

He saw, all right.

More than enough.

He hadn’t even known he was going to do it. He smashed a fist into her temple and sent her staggering across the clearing. She pitched forward after a few steps and the top of her head slammed into the side of the old Buick. The sound her head made when it impacted the solid metal was sickening.

And now look at her.

He tried to stay calm.

There had to be a way out of this.

He snatched up the handbag she’d dropped, undid the clasp, and rooted around inside. He found her keys right away. An idea began to form. It was risky. But he had to do it. He had too much to lose. He would go back to town. Let himself inside Louella’s little house and go over it with a fine-tooth comb, find anything incriminating there and destroy it. Then figure out what to do with Louella and her Fiat Spider, which was parked at the edge of the clearing.

Louella groaned and reached a trembling hand toward him again. She lifted her head and struggled to sit.

Norman grimaced. “I don’t think so, honey.”

He scoured the ground around him and found a rock big enough to fit in his fist. He kept her pinned down with a knee and smashed the rock into her head again and again.

There was a lot more blood.

And, finally, a sickening crack as her skull fractured.

Louella Hollis was dead.

S
EVEN

It was late October and the air outdoors at this hour was getting a bit nippy. Derek McGregor shivered and puffed on his cigarette as he sat on the top step of the abandoned house’s front porch. He exhaled and the smoke plumed in the night air. “Fuck, it’s so fucking cold.”

His voice sounded strange in the otherwise empty clearing. He rarely spoke aloud when he was alone. Sane people kept their thoughts internalized when not in the company of other human beings. This was a thing he believed strongly. His mother talked to herself so often he frequently overheard her when she believed no one else was around. And a lot of things she said were flat-out fucking crazy. Like, she would maybe drop a plate and start screaming. Just going on and on, like, “YOU DID THAT ON FUCKING PURPOSE! LIKE I HAVEN’T HAD ENOUGH FUCKING SHIT TO DEAL WITH TODAY! YOU FUCKING PLANNED THAT! FUCK YOU!”

The plate-dropping thing had happened just a couple days ago, on Sunday. Derek had just left his room after an afternoon nap and was slowly descending the stairs in his sock feet. He came to a dead stop halfway down the staircase as Suzie McGregor’s outburst rang out from the kitchen.

His mother was nuts. There was no other explanation. He had no idea whom she was addressing in those moments. God, maybe? But she’d never been a particularly religious woman, at least not in his memory. It was more like she believed she was being persecuted or conspired against by some undefined cosmic force. You could call it God, but it could as easily be a demon or other malicious supernatural entity. She never invoked God’s name when she was raging like that. But whatever. Derek was content to leave it a mystery. He sure as shit wasn’t about to quiz her on the matter. She’d be furious to have her mental state questioned by her son, of all people.

So he had attempted a hasty retreat. He turned around and began to ascend the stairs back to the second floor, but one of the stairs creaked too loudly.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

The words had almost stopped his heart. “N-nothing.”

“You were spying on me. Weren’t you? Get down here! Now!”

He did as she said. She was his mother. He lived in her house. He started down the stairs and she snagged him by the hair when he got within grabbing distance. She dragged him into the kitchen and slammed him down in a chair, ordering him to lay a hand flat on the kitchen table. He again did as ordered, starting to cry as she went into the pantry and came back with a shiny metal spatula. It was the one his father used for flipping burgers on the grill in the summer. She struck the back of his hand with it numerous times, making him cry out and beg for mercy. But she remained silent and unyielding as she struck him over and over. He lost count of the blows somewhere around twenty.

“Are you going to spy on me again?”

“Never. I promise.”

“Are you sorry?”

“Yes.”

“Say it!”

“I’m s-sorry.”

“Good. Now go up to your room and don’t come down until tomorrow.”

He’d gone up to his room, all right.

And then out the window and out of the house, staying gone all through the next day. He usually returned at dawn, slipping back in through the window and coming down in a fresh change of clothes after a shower, pretending to have been asleep in his bed all night. But that time he hadn’t bothered with the pretense and hadn’t returned home until dawn the following day. He’d expected a stern lecture and interrogation, but neither of his parents had said a word about his absence. He wasn’t too surprised by this, but it hurt him more than he’d anticipated.

They didn’t give a shit about him.

Yet another thing he had in common with most of his friends, sort of a unifying factor kind of deal. He thought of an old saying—
Home is where the heart is
.

It was corny, but true.

His home, his real one, was out here in the dark with his friends, who were more like family to him than any actual blood relative.
We are the Dark Ones
, he thought, and chuckled. It’d started as a joke. A few of them had been drinking and smoking weed. Mark and Natasha had been there. Kevin. Fiona. They had been out all night and it was almost time to part again. They’d all been feeling pretty goofy as the first hint of dawn began to tinge the sky. There was a lot of rambling talk about music and movies. They all liked horror and strange shit in general. They joked about how very
dark
they all were. And it was Natasha who’d intoned in a low, darkly sinister voice, sounding like some cheesy late-night horror host, “
We . . . are . . . the . . . DARK ONES.”

A joke, yes.

But it struck a nerve. The name stuck.

Derek stubbed out his cigarette, shook another from the pack, and struck a match. He was applying the flame to the cigarette when he heard the crunch of booted feet trampling twigs somewhere near the edge of the clearing. He didn’t look up right away. He knew who it was.

A fact confirmed a moment later when a voice called out to him: “Aren’t you fucking cold?”

Derek shrugged. The smoke was lit. “I am impervious to cold. I am a fucking super Eskimo.”

“Eskimos wear fucking parkas and shit when it’s cold, dumbass, not just some fucking T-shirt.”

Derek blew out a cloud of smoke. “You know not the ancient ways of the wise super Eskimos. Give me a beer.”

Jared Kelly hefted the case of Budweiser cans by its cardboard handle. “Stuck this out in the drainage ditch by my house yesterday. At least it won’t be puke warm like last time.”

“Yeah. Lucky it didn’t rain, lardass.”

A broad grin stretched across Jared’s slightly doughy face. He was a good thirty pounds or so overweight, but he was also tall and large of frame, with big biceps and thick wrists. No one outside his circle of friends would ever dare give him shit about his weight.

“A lardass I may be, but I can lose weight and you’re
always
gonna be ugly, son.”

Derek laughed. He knew he wasn’t ugly. Girls liked him, despite his strangeness. “I don’t know about that, man, but I do know I’m way too fucking sober. Beer me.”

Jared approached the porch and set the case of Bud down on the top step. He ripped a corner of the big carton open, pulled out a can, and said, “Help yourself.” He knocked back a slug of Bud and made a sound of satisfaction. “You know what I like about beer?”

“What?”

“Everything.”

Derek opened a can. “I’d kill for some vodka, though. I like to get fucked up faster.”

Jared laughed. “You want to commit murder, do it just for kicks. Campbell will get you the booze.”

Clayton Campbell was the older guy they hung out with sometimes. He had a house in the neighborhood. He sold them pot now and then and sometimes bought them booze, usually at jacked-up prices. Which was a rip-off. The guy had plenty of cashola. He just did it because he could.

Derek frowned. “Can’t afford the surcharge.”

Jared tilted his head back and gulped down the rest of his first brew. “Shit, I’ll give you the money. Or just pay Clayton for it myself.”

Derek shrugged. “Cool, whatever.”

Jared’s father was CEO of Stanton Manufacturing. He gave his son a generous weekly allowance. Which was sort of putting it mildly. Jared had more money coming in on a weekly basis than any minimum wage–earning student at Ransom High School. He was as messed up as any of them, but he had one up on the rest of his friends in one significant way—his parents didn’t loathe him.

Jared popped the tab on his second beer and glanced up at the half-gabled hip roof on the left end of the old house. He shivered. “Fucking creepy.”

Derek twisted his neck to get a look at the house from Jared’s perspective. The window up there was boarded, like every other possible means of entry. Someone had painted a pentagram on the board covering the window long ago. The black spray paint was nearly as faded as the blue paint flaking away from the outer walls.

“Makes you wonder.”

Jared grunted between sips of beer. “Wonder what?”

Still staring at the pentagram—which the moonlight rendered dimly distinguishable amid the shadows cast by the roof’s angles—Derek said, “Makes you wonder what happened here.” His head swiveled back toward Jared. “That fucking pentagram’s there for a reason, I can feel it.”

Jared snorted. “Right. Maybe you shouldn’t watch so many horror movies.”

“Fuck that. And anyway, you can feel it, too. Tell me I’m lying.”

Jared glanced at the pentagram again. “I feel something, but whatever. Show me an abandoned old house out in the woods that’s not a little bit creepy. Ain’t any such thing. It’s just a house. And it’s been here fucking forever. You think you were the first to find it? No way. Maybe some Black Sabbath–listening stoner from 1973 or whatever painted that thing.” He nodded. “Yeah, I can see that.”

Derek didn’t reply.

It was too easy to imagine. So easy he could see the scene vividly in his head—some lanky longhair with a head full of acid and Sabbath tunes crawling around up there on the roof with a bucket of black paint.

“BOO, BITCHES!”

Derek shot to his feet as Jared dropped his beer and whirled toward the source of the sound. Derek turned in the same direction, unconsciously positioning himself so that Jared’s bulk was between him and the intruder. A dark form moved out of the shadows near the side of the house. It was carrying something long and dangerous-looking.

Then Derek got a look at the intruder’s face and groaned. “You asshole.”

Smug laughter. “Scared ya, huh?”

Derek showed Kevin Cooper a middle finger. “Fuck you, douche bag. Hold on. Is that what I think it is?”

“Yeah, if you think it’s a fucking sledgehammer. If you think it’s a bag of fluffy bunnies, I don’t know what to tell you.”

Kevin approached the porch with the sledgehammer propped over one shoulder. He grabbed a brew from the Bud carton and popped the tab.

Derek frowned. “Where in fuck did you get a fucking sledgehammer?”

Kevin knocked back half his first brew in one go and belched loudly. “You know that shed behind the Carlton place?”

“Uh huh.”

“Broke into that. Found some funny shit. The most massive collection of
Playboy
magazines you’ve ever fucking seen. Snagged a few of those. And there was a mannequin. Like a full-sized lady mannequin. Weird shit. And there was this.” He lifted the sledgehammer off his shoulder, set the heavy end on the ground, and leaned on the handle. “A fucking monster-ass sledgehammer.”

Derek grabbed another beer. “So why’d you take it?”

Kevin smiled.

“Oh.” Awareness dawned. Derek looked at the house. The shadows at the far end of the porch, where the boarded front door was located, seemed more sinister now, as if something lurked there. Some kind of . . .
thing
.

But that was ridiculous.

Wasn’t it?

Kevin climbed the steps to the porch and turned to face them. “I’m getting up in this bitch tonight. Who’s with me?”

“Um . . .”

“Don’t be a pussy.”

The magic words
. What guy his age wouldn’t rise to that provocation?

He sighed and glanced at Jared, who shrugged.

Jared looked unperturbed. “Whatever.”