Dark Screams, Volume 3 Read online

  “It’s Carlos and Drew,” she explained. “They were supposed to meet Jean-Paul after work, only they didn’t show up. And they’re not answering their phones. Neither one of them. That never happens. JP and Jill made a few calls, and neither of them came into work today, either.”

  “The brewery?” I said. “We’re going to look for them there?”

  “I think they were doing some extracurricular mapping while there’s still time. You know how fanatical they are about it.”

  And that’s how you put together a search party.

  We descended on the site with none of our usual enthusiasm, instead trying to come up with all the reasons why there could be a good outcome to this, and most of them were a reach. Nobody wanted to state the obvious, that what we really had to fear was that a floor or stairway had collapsed beneath them, or a ceiling over them, or some piece of machinery had become unmoored. Or they’d encountered a squatter who was territorial and violent. Or they’d stirred up a strange cloud of mold spores that had driven them insane.

  We wanted to find them every bit as much as we didn’t.

  Ordinarily, splitting up happened organically, if at all, but now it was essential. Three teams of two could cover ground a lot faster than one team of six. Tara and I were still the noobs, though, so the others didn’t want us pairing off. Jill decreed that Jean-Paul and I shouldn’t go together, either, so that two teams, at least, could benefit from our greater upper-body strength—gender distinctions that she never would’ve tolerated at any other time.

  We nattered longer than necessary, who would go with whom, until finally Tara thrust her arm in Jill’s and jabbed her finger at me, then Marni, and said, “Go ahead, you two, you make such a great team, you know you probably had your hearts set on it the whole goddamn ride over.”

  Just the kind of thing that makes everyone pause and wish they were someplace else.

  “Yeah. Okay. Whatever,” Jean-Paul said. “Could we refocus and remember why we’re here?”

  Who could argue with that? So it was JP and Marilisa, Tara and Jill, Marni and me. Marilisa had prepared copies of a hurried layout of the buildings making up the brewery complex, and we marked them with which teams would take which buildings. There was at least one handset per team, hand-size walkie-talkies with a ten-mile range, and we looped them around our necks on thongs, with orders that everyone check in every five or ten minutes.

  Then we set off on our separate ways into the October night, the air frosty and hard. Even inside the buildings the chill felt deeper than before, burrowing for our bones, and I’d never felt this cold without ice being involved.

  “I didn’t mean to cause trouble,” Marni told me as soon as we were alone and out of earshot. “Really, I didn’t.”

  “I know. But I don’t think that’s something you can cause. It’s more like you pry up what’s already there.”

  We started with what had been the administrative building, mostly offices and storage rooms, nothing challenging physically, but it was a lot of legwork. And keeping the layout straight in our heads, so we didn’t go in circles, was a far greater challenge by flashlight than it would have been during the day.

  Even in as short a time as I’d been part of the team, I’d done this at night, but that hadn’t prepared me for how unnerving it was this time. It didn’t feel daring anymore. There was no courage in numbers now. Our flashlights had never seemed so feeble, had never revealed so little—small pools of light skimming over a bleached world choked on shadows, shadows over all. Any room could have held two corpses, could’ve been eager for two more. At each doorway we came to I had to steel myself to check all over again.

  Every couple of minutes we called out, hoping for a response, but nothing came back. Every so often someone would initiate another round of check-ins, tinny voices crackling over our hearts. Every few rooms we would speed-dial Drew’s and Carlos’s phones, in hopes of hearing them ring. Every now and again something small skittered to safety, because for all it knew, we’d come to eat it.

  And like a black hole, the building swallowed everything, sound and light and hope, and radiated particles of decay.

  “I’m just afraid,” Marni said, “that whatever happens, you’ll end up hating me.”

  “I won’t hate you. I could never hate you,” I told her, and meant it.

  But did it count if I wished that she’d found some other place to live? That Gandalf the Tie-Dyed had returned someone else’s call before he’d returned hers, and they’d been the ones to move in next door? That seemed permissible. Tonight everything could’ve been just the same as it had been seven months ago, and would be the same seven months from now.

  Instead, I couldn’t even know what seven hours was going to bring.

  We cleared the admin building, and moved along to the next.

  It was after midnight when our handsets crackled with something more than a routine lack-of-progress report.

  “Guys? Are you there?” It was Jean-Paul, and his voice sounded a few notches higher, as if something in him were being tightened to see how long it would endure before it broke. “You need to get over here.”

  Jill’s voice crackled over next. “Did you find them?”

  “I…I don’t know.” JP’s breathing was harsh and heavy, like distorted panting. “Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

  Marilisa came on, no less frantic, telling us where to find them in the huge main brewhouse. It was a section of the third floor, in the very heart of the building, that we’d bypassed the first time we were here, because we’d encountered a metal door we couldn’t open. Later, we’ll come back to try it later, we’d said at the time, since there was so much else to explore, but we hadn’t, and I suppose it had become too much of a magnet for our resident cartographers. Maybe they’d found some keys.

  Marni and I rushed out of the building we were in, back out onto the empty street, running the length of the block to the entry point we’d made. The streetlamps didn’t work, not here. It was just moonlight and the blurry smudges and pinpoints in the office towers in the distance, not all that far, but still a world away.

  We clutched hands once we got inside, instinctively, each of us, I think, needing something solid to hang on to, or simply not to lose each other.

  It was all wide hallways and yawning stairwells, the beams of our flashlights bouncing and slashing, scythes trying to cut through a darkness it could never harvest. Voices filtered down from some indistinct place above, more than two, so Tara and Jill had beaten us here. We couldn’t make out what anyone was saying, but we didn’t have to know that they’d found something bad up there. The tone of panic cuts through any amount of murk.

  “—keep away from—”

  I made out that much.

  We pounded higher, and now there was a kind of gravity to it, in disobedience to the earth, a pull from the front and a subtle wind at our backs that blew through us as if to teach us we were nothing.

  “Don’t touch her!”

  There was no mistaking that one.

  At the third floor Marni and I retraced old steps, until we came to the door that had thwarted us before, now wedged open with a rubber stop—Drew’s or Carlos’s. Carrying them was routine, because it was stupid and potentially dangerous to trap yourself behind a door with a broken handle or a dodgy latch.

  Past that, it was a matter of following the shouting and the tears down a hallway that led to a high-ceilinged area that may have been a control room for directing water flow. I saw the suggestion of pipes and panels and valve wheels, but they were no more distinct than the bowels of a shipwreck glimpsed at the bottom of a churning sea. It was so hard to tell. Our flashlights had joined the others, but they were still inadequate for the job. Whatever had gathered here, our lights were not made to penetrate it.

  Beside me, Marni’s breath caught in her throat.

  We had seen this abyssal darkness before. She’d shown it
to me, needing me, needing anyone, to verify it. I think there’s something that’s been following me, she’d said, but maybe that was too limited. Maybe it hadn’t been following her at all. Maybe it was all around, and she was just the first to be aware of it.

  Head count: Jean-Paul, who stood pressing his back against a wall with a hand clamped over his mouth. Marilisa, who squatted crying and inconsolable. Tara, who…I couldn’t tell. I had no reference point for the expression on her face. And Jill.

  Half of Jill.

  There was no name for what was occurring here. Maybe not even a precedent. Half of her stood facing our direction, as if she’d turned at the waist, to say something to Tara behind her, then stopped, her mouth open in mid-word. Forever. Her left side was all there to see, until my perception began filling in the rest. It was still there, only…not. Recognizing this was the key to seeing Carlos and Drew a few steps beyond her, one of them having dropped to one knee, the other poised as if reaching down to help him up.

  They had turned the color of onyx and tar, although it wasn’t a black of substance. More like they were person-shaped holes punched in the fabric of reality, and as we watched, it took Jill over a little more, a little more, a little more.

  Was she alive at this point? I don’t know. Define alive. Her eye moved, and blinked once, and a couple of her fingers twitched. For a time I thought she might’ve been breathing, because I heard it, a slow, high-pitched intake of air…only it never stopped. She never exhaled. Dust motes swam in the beams of light that crisscrossed over her face, then were caught up in the current, slowly at first, then zip, they were gone, drawn into her open mouth and wherever it led.

  Her eye went black, and the rest of her hair, and the shadow in her remaining nostril seemed to blossom and consume the rest of her nose. Her teeth became negatives of themselves, and her limbs were consumed from her shoulder and hip to her extremities, like gangrene in reverse.

  Until she, like Carlos and Drew before her, had been…

  Nullified.

  “What the fuck, man. What the fuck.” It was all Jean-Paul could say. He’d been saying it awhile. He spoke for the rest of us, except maybe for Marilisa, who looked like she was struggling not to be sick.

  Until now, I’d thought of this darkness as something that gathered. But it began to seem like something so much more, because that would mean it could meet borders and be contained. Instead, what we were seeing could just as easily have been like this: what lay behind a painting rubbed with a rag soaked in mineral spirits, the dissolving oil pigments wiped away to reveal a hidden painting beneath, an interior vastness that burned with the cold light of stars and the elusive colors of nebulae.

  Tara turned away from the void that had been Jill, and for a few moments stared at me, at Marni, looking somewhere between bewildered and vindicated, and I realized we were still holding hands. For no better reason than that we’d forgotten to let go. What was there to say to this—It’s not what it looks like? And it wasn’t. But by this point, I doubt that our particular version of the truth mattered anymore.

  “I don’t think you have any idea how much you’ve been wanting this, or for how long,” she said. “So live with it.”

  Facing us, eyes leveled at us the entire time, Tara walked backward, one deliberate step after another, until she no longer had to, no longer could, and let herself be subsumed by whatever lay beyond.

  Was she in pain at this point? I don’t know. Define pain.

  I’d been here before: Once you got past the urge to run, the hardest thing to do was look away. Because her eyes never closed, and were among the last of her to disappear. That, and the sound of a final breath that went on and on, the next worst thing to the sound of eternity.

  —

  Demolition of the brewery went ahead as planned, a few days behind schedule, but not long enough to read anything significant in the delay.

  We watched it happen, Marni and I, from a mile away, on the roof of another dead-end mesa, a hotel that had taken sixty slow years to wither and die. The team had intended to get to it but hadn’t yet, and never would. It was just us now, us against the world.

  The charges detonated inside and out, silent puffs of smoke, then five seconds later the sound caught up to us, like a movie out of sync, as the old brick behemoth went into freefall. The sad, faded specter of the aviator and his plane crashed in a boiling cloud of dust that spread outward as if it had been poured from the sky.

  “What if this has happened before, all of it, a hundred thousand times before?” Marni said, and with what we’d seen, it was easy to imagine that it had.

  For every Big Bang, a Big Crunch. For every weaving, a great unraveling. For every ascension to a higher order, a descent into chaos and entropy. Over and over again, an endless cycle playing out across time, and here we were, caught in the middle once again, with no way off this ride. The only consolation was that if you looked at it that way, then it really hadn’t mattered that we’d as good as killed Tara, because nothing else did either. She was doomed, regardless, like the rest of us. Our atoms would disperse and recombine, and maybe in a few billion years I’d get a chance to do it all over again, and this time get it right.

  We watched for the day, and the rest of that night, and by morning it appeared that the massive pile of rubble was smaller. Except there had been no trucks yet, no bulldozers, no cranes to lift or buckets to scoop, and get it out of the way of progress. To look at it, it was the same rubble, nothing removed from on top, but instead eroding from beneath.

  “I wish I’d met you sooner,” Marni said.

  “I know.”

  “You’re the only guy who ever got me.”

  Was I supposed to feel good about that? But I guess this didn’t matter either, so I chose to feel great about it. Yes. I got you. I. Got. You. So in this endless theater of cruelty and loss, let that be our greatest act of defiance. I got you.

  A mile away, a fresh plume of dust rose amid a great and terrible collapsing, then reversed, sucked back down into its source. Five seconds later, the sound reached us. I would say I’d never heard anything like it in my life, but maybe that only applied to this one.

  “Are you ready?” she said.

  “For…?”

  “Whatever comes next.”

  I could smile at her, and almost make it look genuine.

  I just don’t know. Define ready.

  For Marty Greenberg and Ed Gorman, with gratitude…

  About the Editors

  RICHARD CHIZMAR is the founder and publisher/editor of Cemetery Dance magazine and the Cemetery Dance Publications book imprint. He has edited more than a dozen anthologies, including The Best of Cemetery Dance, The Earth Strikes Back, Night Visions 10, October Dreams (with Robert Morrish), and the Shivers series.

  BRIAN JAMES FREEMAN is the managing editor of Cemetery Dance Publications and the author of several novels and novellas, along with four short story collections including an eBook-only exclusive that hit #1 on Amazon.com in the United States, UK, Germany, Spain, and France in the short story categories. His blog and website can be found at: http://www.BrianJamesFreeman.com.

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