The Coming Dark

  By Erin McCarthy

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright © 2012 by Erin McCarthy

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced in any fashion without the express, written consent of the copyright holder.

  The Coming Dark is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed herein are fictitious and are not based on any real persons living or dead.

  Chapter One

  Mommy And Me

  My mother was murdered with me in the room. I saw it, but I don’t remember. I was only two years old, and even though the next-door neighbor found me sitting in my mother’s blood screaming, her body next to me sliced to ribbons by thirty-two stab wounds, I have no memory of it.

  Which is a good thing.

  But I dreamed of it my whole childhood, the details and the killer always changing, the scene shifting and warping as I aged, but the theme always the same—terror. I woke up screaming, shaking, hair damp with sweat, over and over for years until my grandmother and the pediatrician put me on sleeping pills and anti-depressants.

  They stopped.

  Until now.

  Chapter Two

  The Nightmare

  Running, out of breath, my training not preparing me for the fear I’d feel, I tripped over a tree branch and fell, like every stupid teen girl in short-shorts in every horror movie ever made. I wasn’t in denim barely covering my butt, but neither was I dressed for late November in Maine, my hoodie and jeans taking on water as I landed in a pile of snow. I ordered myself to get up, to claw and scramble off the frozen ground, to ignore the wind and strain of my lungs and get out of the woods. Reach the house. Reach safety, a place with doors where I could block the entrance with the symbols I’d been taught would keep a demon from entering.

  If he wanted to catch me, he probably could, but the knife I’d driven into his side would slow him down. It had sank with an ease that had made me want to throw up, my mind very aware that this had started with a knife.

  It seemed fitting it would end the same way.

  Darius was back there, somewhere, but I had no sense of where. The woods felt silent except for the rush of the lonely wind and my panting, the crunch of my Converse on the snow. I wanted to be strong, I wanted to survive, I wanted to fight so I pushed harder, my eyes shooting around the dusky foliage, wishing this was a dream.

  But it wasn’t. It was a nightmare, a very real one.

  That had started with the dream two months ago.

  The murder dream.

  I was almost there, the back door of the house beckoning me, so close…

  The whispers started, springing from the trees, the ground, surrounding me like a whirlpool of scathing, coaxing voices. Join us. Join us.

  Then the hit from behind was so unexpected and so hard, I went pitching forward, eating a facefull of snow, slicing my lip and hands on the ice.

  Vivid blood smeared the pristine white snow and I knew this was it.

  The end.

  Chapter Three

  The Beginning

  The room is dark, just the glow of the TV bouncing off the walls. The apartment, small and musty, with a layer of air freshener scent over top the damp, like my mom has tried to mask the odor. Warm blanket under me, my fingers rubbing, rubbing over its nubby softness. Normal. Everything normal, quiet and calm, sleep pulling at me, dragging my head down to my chin.

  The doorbell. Mom’s legs moving past to answer. The door slamming shut. Loud, angry voices. Fear scattering my fatigue and I move closer to the door, half hiding behind the couch to see who is here.

  A man in a dark jacket with his back to me, sounds, words from both I don’t understand, a crash as my mom falls and bumps the lamp on the way down. Her leg springing up, landing a kick, a flash of silver in the air.

  The screams starting, piercing and shrill, then the odd sound, like gargling mouthwash, something spraying out from that dark arm in all directions, a rain shower of blood. Squeezing the couch, I wait for normal to return, for the man to leave, for my mom to pick me up and smile like she does when she calls me Sunshine.

  The whole room starts to spin, to whirl, like I’ve been turned upside down, the TV blinking, my mother below me still and wet, a sick, sweet smell clogging my nostrils.

  And the face that pops up in front of me like a jack-in-the-box, staring into my eyes, belongs to my father…

  Starting awake, I sucked in a deep breath, and tried to calm my racing heart. Glancing around the study hall room, I tucked my dark hair behind my ear and tried to figure out if anyone noticed I’d had a nightmare. Or specifically, if Darius had seen me jerking awake. He was new at Bay High, in most of my classes, completely hot, and totally unaware I existed. He was thin, but not scrawny, and he had the look of an indie rocker. A chain trailed from his belt to his pocket and his dark hair always slid into his eyes. He was wearing an AC/DC t-shirt and not paying any attention to me, as usual, eyes trained on a magazine. I diverted my eyes before he noticed me noticing him.

  Most of the students were staring blankly at books in front of them, a few asleep like I had been, only one girl actually studiously writing as she did her homework. No one was looking at me.

  Except for Abby.

  She leaned toward me and murmured, “You okay?”

  I nodded. “Just a nightmare.”

  “The nightmare?”

  Another nod. My heart was still pounding too fast, a rapid staccato that punctuated my fear. My armpits felt damp under the cotton of my t-shirt and I was grateful I was wearing a hoodie over top of it so there weren’t wet circles hanging out for everyone to see.

  “Did you see his face?” Abby asked, holding her dark brown hair over her upper lip like a moustache, something she does when she’s nervous.

  She’d been my best friend since I was four years old, shortly after my grandmother moved us to the mid-coast of Maine, away from Portland where my mother was murdered. After Grammy had changed my last name to Matthews to avoid the notoriety, and I think, to prevent my father from finding me if he ever chose to show up looking.

  I didn’t think he would.

  My sixteenth birthday had been six months earlier and in all those years he’d never appeared in person. Not a phone call. A birthday card. Nothing.

  Of course, some people still thought he killed my mother, a jealous husband stabbing her in a fit of rage, so staying hidden, away from the notoriety, made sense even if he didn’t do it. Which I didn’t know if he did or not. I wanted to think it was a random act of violence because no one wants to believe the man who married their mom, who had a baby with her, who had me, would kill her, but I didn’t know the truth. No one knew the truth but my mother and her voice had been silenced forever. A voice I couldn’t even remember.

  “It was my father,” I admitted. “But it doesn’t mean anything, Abby, because it’s different every time. They’re not real memories, just my version of what probably happened. I don’t even really feel two years old in them, more like me now seeing what I think I would have seen and heard, you know what I mean? I don’t have any real memories of it.”

  Abby was convinced that the key to solving Mom’s murder was locked in my brain.

  But it wasn’t. There was nothing in me except for a yearning for the mother I didn’t remember and the grandmother I did.

  And an overwhelming desire to be normal, to be like every other kid at Bay High, with a regular, if occasionally dysfunctional family, siblings, a cool wardrobe, and hair that cooperated with the flat iron. Not so much to ask for, but for me, totally and utterly unobtainable.

  “I still think—”

  Mrs. Giroux shushed Abby. “No talking in study hall.” Then she promptly stuck her nose back into her Time magazine, which I knew was actually hiding a People magazine, a secret she had revealed one day when she’d dropped both.

  After a few seconds of waiting for her to get re-absorbed in star gossip, I pulled at my T-shirt and shifted on my seat. Then I lowered my voice and told Abby, “I don’t even remember my dad. I only know his face because of pictures.” Two pictures, to be precise. That was all my mother had to remember the man she’d created a child with, a man who had run out on her when I was a year old.

  Not a nice guy, my father. But capable of murder? I didn’t know.

  And sometimes I thought it didn’t matter. Neither one of them were in my life and that was the reality.

  I was spared Abby’s response by the bell ringing. Tossing my history book in my backpack, I lifted it up onto my shoulder, accidentally clipping Mariah Haggerty with it.

  Damn. Before I could offer an apology, she was already protesting.

  “Watch it, Freak.”

  That had been her nickname for me since sixth grade when I’d gone on a Girl Scout sleepover and woke up screaming from a nightmare. I had been dreaming of the man in the dark coat standing over my mother, systematically driving his knife into her. For the first time in a dream I actually launched myself at him, knocking him to the ground, grappling at his throat, choking him, rage giving me unnatural strength, as I grew from a two-year-old to a ten-year-old to a full-grown adult…like I was my mother herself fighting him, squeezing womanly hands around his thick neck as we fell into a dark yawning hole. Only when I woke up, I was choking Mariah in the sleeping bag next to me, her eyes wide and terrified as she smacked at me, gasping and squeaking in fear.

  After that I was never invited to spend the night anywhere but Abby’s house.

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