Darkness Falls (Delirium Novella Series) Read online

  FIRST EDITION

  Darkness Falls © 2011 by Allan Leverone

  Cover Artwork © 2011 by Zach McCain

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DELIRIUM BOOKS

  P.O. Box 338

  North Webster, IN 46555

  www.deliriumbooks.com

  Acknowledgements

  I have the greatest family in the world: My wife, Sue, who married me at nineteen, before she knew any better, and who has accompanied me through nearly thirty years of ups and downs. My three children, Stefanie, Kristin and Craig, who have taught me as much or more than I ever taught them, and my little granddaughter Arianna, my pal, who never tires of playing with an old guy.

  These are the people who have believed in me as a writer with near-religious fervor, showing more faith in my abilities than I deserve. They are also the people who make all the effort, and any success I may achieve, worthwhile. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  1

  Tyler Beckman’s four wheel drive Toyota struggled up the side of Sunrise Mountain, its wheels scrabbling for purchase on the woefully inadequate northern New Hampshire road. Rocks and pebbles and baseball-sized chunks of broken pavement flew from under the tires and Tyler checked his rear view, thankful no one was behind him. If there had been, the unlucky driver’s vehicle would have been getting peppered with buckshot.

  He realized he was nervous, sweating profusely, and he wiped his forehead with the rolled-up sleeve of his ratty flannel shirt as he manhandled the steering wheel in a constant struggle to avoid sliding off the side of the mountain. Whether his case of the jitters was thanks to the shitty road conditions or because he was returning to this God-awful tiny town after so many years away he decided he didn’t really want to know.

  Skeletal oak trees and centuries-old evergreens crowded in on the road from both sides as if fighting to reclaim territory they viewed as rightly theirs. They seemed to be winning. Their bony claws scraped the right side of the SUV and Tyler began to feel a creeping sense of claustrophobia. It felt like the trees were about to pluck him right out of his car. From somewhere close by, a crack of thunder shook the Toyota on its springs and a muted flash of lightning illuminated the layer of swirling black clouds hanging just over the treetops. Tyler wondered if it was an omen. He continued on.

  The road felt narrower and rougher than he remembered from his childhood; it was almost like a cow path. He wondered whether any maintenance at all had been done on the goddamned thing since he left. He doubted it.

  The Toyota crested a hill and turned a corner and just like that, Tyler was descending the other side of Sunrise Mountain into his old home town of Darkness Falls. Even as a kid, when the Falls was still the only place he had ever lived, Tyler remembered wondering what the original settlers way back in the 1600s could possibly have been thinking, establishing a village in this remote valley sandwiched between two good-sized New England mountains.

  Not for the first time, Tyler questioned his intelligence if not his sanity in returning to this cursed place. “Too late now,” he muttered to himself, knowing that was not really true—he could still make a nice, neat K-turn on the deserted piece of shit mountain road and get the fuck out, no blood, no foul, no one in Darkness Falls would know the difference or care. He wiped the sweat from his eyes again and continued on anyway.

  * * *

  The house was ancient, originally built somewhere between 1680 and 1700—even the Darkness Falls residents most well-versed in their town’s long history could not place the date of construction any more accurately than that—by an early settler who was by all accounts a family man and eighteenth century community leader. Upstanding. Church-going. Well-respected. Right up until he murdered his family in their beds. Joshua Lachance took a sharpened farm implement—a pickaxe, it was later determined—to his wife and six children in the middle of the night, wielding the tool like a man possessed, leaving nothing behind but corpses and blood.

  And, of course, the house. Once the assorted body parts were removed and the blood scrubbed away, the New England farmhouse stood as charming and picturesque as ever. Over the intervening centuries, various owners had completed various projects, constructing additions and performing maintenance, but the home remained essentially the same as it had been the night Joshua Lachance inexplicably descended into madness.

  Now it belonged to Tyler Beckman, at least as much as a rental could belong to a man who had written a check to the realtor charged with maintaining the empty property. He sat perched in the middle of the room he had decided to use as an office. It was a bedroom, technically, one of six on the second floor of the big house, but Tyler didn’t give a damn about minor technicalities. He had decided to make it his office, so it was his office.

  Tyler pounded the keys on his laptop with a single-mindedness of purpose, lost in his work. It was the sort of manic intensity he used to experience all the time but hadn’t felt in years. Hell, if he was being honest with himself, he had long since given up on ever experiencing it again. And yet, here he was, not six hours after moving his few meager belongings into his new home, and he was hard at work.

  His computer lay atop a six foot long two-by-eight plank that Tyler had uncovered while rummaging around in the dank earthen-floor basement of the old house. He struggled up the two stories to his new home office, banging the plank into walls and narrowly avoiding putting one end of it through a window while navigating the narrow stairs. Then he stretched it between a pair of paint-splattered saw horses before setting immediately to work. Time and moisture had caused the plank to warp slightly, giving Tyler’s makeshift desk the ramshackle look of a child’s tree house, built by a twelve year old with more enthusiasm than skill.

  He didn’t care. The wobble of his computer, tilting to the left when he struck the lower left side of the keyboard and to the right when he typed on the upper right side, barely slowed his creative progress. After the first few minutes he didn’t even notice. He just wrote. Words flowed out of him like they had done in the old days, firing in the synapses of his brain before flowing through his arms and out his fingers; words forming sentences, sentences forming paragraphs, paragraphs piling up into pages of prose strung together in almost lyrical fashion, crowding onto the computer screen and telling his story.

  Behind Tyler, the setting sun struggled to fight its way into the room through windows covered in grime, windows that looked as though they hadn’t been washed in years, maybe decades. Cardboard boxes filled with Tyler’s unpacked belongings surrounded him as he worked, casting lengthening shadows on the floor as the afternoon moved toward night, and still he typed.

  2

  Tyler Beckman had burst onto the literary scene in the mid-1990s, leaving his home town of Darkness Falls, New Hampshire and all the tragedy of his young life behind and releasing a string of bestselling gothic horror novels, one per year for the first six years of his career, each succeeding book outselling his previous ones. Two of the books were optioned by a moderately successful Hollywood producer, eventually becoming moderately successful Hollywood films.

  Fame and fortune followed. Time Magazine ran a cover story asking, “Is Tyler Beckman the next Stephen King?” and on the magazine’s cover there had been a shot of King with his hands around Tyler’s neck, pretending to strangle him. The world was his oyster. There was money, and there were women, and there were fast cars and coke, too much of all of them.

  A string of failed marriages and failed business ventures left the rising novelist with little of his accumulated fortune, but who cared, right? There would always be another book, another movie, more money, more women and cars and coke, right? Wouldn’t there?

  It turned out there would not. Because overnight it all ended. The inspiration disappeared like white powder cut into neat thin lines on a mirror. The words stopped flowing and the books stopped being written and the movie deals dried up. By 2003 Tyler Beckman was an afterthought in the literary world, no longer writing books, moving around the country doing odd jobs, occasionally living out of his car.

  He worked as a tour guide at a Southwestern national park, as a housepainter, an apple-picker, a cab-driver, most of the time for barely more than minimum wage, occasionally not even that. Eventually he landed at an exclusive prep school in upstate New York, teaching English and Composition to spoiled rich kids, unable to write more than a few coherent sentences and wondering what in the bloody hell had happened. Nobody compared him to Stephen King anymore, because nobody talked about him anymore.

  After that one excruciating year spent trying to teach cynical kids things they didn’t care about, Tyler Beckman came to a conclusion he would have considered unimaginable a decade before. He would leave New York and return to the tiny New England town he had escaped nearly two decades earlier. Darkness Falls was the scene of his own real-life horror, the fertile ground from which had sprung all of the material for his best work, the birthplace of the demons he had spent his entire adult life trying to exorcise. His horrible muse.

  He loaded the handful of possessions he had been able to retain through all of the marital and financial failures into his trusty five-year-old Toyota—there was depressingly little to show for ten yea
rs of writing and a half-dozen successful books; it all fit into the compact SUV with plenty of room to spare—and drove nine hours straight, arriving in Darkness Falls in the purplish-green gloom of a gathering thunderstorm. It was like a cliché, and it was the most appropriate welcome home message Tyler could imagine.

  Inside of two days, Tyler Beckman had rented a big, rambling house that had sat empty for almost twenty years. He hired a realtor he found in the tiny “downtown” section of Darkness Falls—it was still just as small as it had been when Tyler left and boasted just the one real estate broker—to show him available rental properties, all the while knowing exactly which house he wanted.

  When he lowered himself into the supple leather seats of the realtor’s Lexus and inquired as to the availability of the old Stowe house, the woman first pretended not to hear him and then ignored the question until he asked it again. She suggested an airy ten-year-old split complete with remodeled kitchen and working fireplace—“great for a young bachelor!”—and in response Tyler again suggested the old Stowe house. She suggested a nice downtown apartment and he suggested the Stowe house.

  Finally the woman gave in, driving them to the outskirts of Darkness Falls and beyond, bouncing the car down a little-used country lane that made the Sunrise Mountain access road seem like a four-lane superhighway by comparison. She turned into what at one time had been a gravel driveway but was now a mostly weed-choked flat spot where the grass had grown in thick and heavy.

  The house loomed large and silent against the backdrop of endless forest, running uninterrupted from New Hampshire deep into Canada. It reminded Tyler of Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?—a matronly Hollywood actress who had once been a ravishing beauty but had now nearly completed her slide into broken-down old age.

  He stepped out of the car, nervous, sweating heavily, ignoring the curious glances the realtor flashed in his direction when she thought he wasn’t looking. He turned and waited for the woman to get out of her car and join him and thought for a moment she would refuse. Finally she opened her door, reluctance plain on her face, and showed Tyler Beckman around the property.

  “I’ve owned the real estate office here in Darkness Falls for a long time,” she volunteered, struggling to turn the key in a front door lock that had not been used in close to twenty years.

  Tyler knew where she was going and refused to help her get there. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. I had been in business for several years by the time…well, you know, by the time…”

  Tyler scrunched his face up, hoping to achieve a look of confusion. “By the time…?” He shook his head and shrugged and waited for her to finish her thought, feeling like an asshole but figuring she deserved the embarrassment. She should have kept her damn mouth shut.

  “Well, you know,” she finally continued. “By the time he killed your family.”

  “Ah,” Tyler nodded, as if he could for even one moment have forgotten the identity of the man who butchered his mother, father and sister so long ago. As if he could have forgotten the jury’s verdict at the end of Stowe’s murder trial: Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity. As if he could have forgotten that Rufus Stowe had been remanded to the Granite State Home for the Criminally Insane to live out the remainder of his days in taxpayer-funded comfort while Tyler’s entire family decomposed in their graves.

  He turned a harsh glare on the realtor and asked, “Shall we continue?” in a husky voice. He knew that everyone in town who still remembered him—and that amounted to pretty much everyone in town, since Ty was by far Darkness Falls’ most famous native son—would consider him just as crazy as Rufus Stowe once they found out he had moved into the lunatic’s old house. Plenty of townspeople viewed it as haunted, considering its violent history, but Tyler didn’t care. He was comfortable with ghosts; he carried plenty around himself.

  Maybe his could make a few friends.

  3

  A single bulb lit the room dimly, hanging from the ceiling by its exposed wiring. At one time a light fixture had been placed there, that was obvious, but the brass had been scavenged or stolen years ago and Tyler had neither the time nor the interest in shopping for a new one. The forty watts of light was wholly insufficient, the bulb attempting gamely to chase away the encroaching nighttime blackness but succeeding only in illuminating the office in a dingy gray hue. Dark, spidery shadows protruded like cancerous growths from the unpacked boxes, their angles sharp and distinct, as if running across the worn hardwood floor to escape the light.

  It was three o’clock in the morning but Tyler didn’t notice the time or care. He was in a zone he hadn’t occupied since finishing his last book years ago. He continued typing madly, vomiting words onto the page, his nimble fingers barely able to keep pace with his storytelling mind. The rush of inspiration was similar to what it had been in the old days, only better. Back then, he had known exactly what he wanted to say but it had taken a supreme amount of effort to construct the words in the proper way; to make the readers not just want to continue turning the pages, but to make them need to do so.

  Now, the words crowded onto the computer screen almost of their own accord. He pounded the keys, not stopping or even slowing, working harder than he had in years, harder maybe than he had ever worked. But even with the speed at which he was working, Tyler knew his words were good. No, they were better than good. They were great. Sure, this was only the beginning of a first draft, there was plenty of hard work ahead, but he was composing fantastic stuff, award-winning stuff, New York Times Bestseller List stuff.

  This was the novel that would bring it all back—the success, the attention, and, yes, the money. Tyler was certain of it. He was so involved in telling this new story after years of wandering in the Sahara Desert of writer’s block that he had done nothing more than the bare minimum to make his new home livable. Boxes went unopened, furniture was thrown haphazardly into rooms, and desperately needed cleaning and maintenance work on the long-neglected house went undone.

  The writing was more important. The writing was everything. This book would bring back all he had lost.

  Taking a short break, nearly panting from the effort he had expended pounding the keys on his laptop, Ty looked around the room, squinting into the dark corners, which the artificial light from the overmatched bulb seemed unable to penetrate with any measurable level of success. He stared for a long moment, eyebrows knitted together in concentration. Something wasn’t quite right. Hadn’t those boxes been positioned differently earlier?

  He thought hard, trying to remember. All the boxes were the same—Save Rite Van Lines stamped on the sides, purchased by Tyler by the dozen in Albany before leaving for Darkness Falls. They represented the very essence of random distribution after his moving frenzy, so it was hard to remember exactly where each box had been. But they just didn’t look like they had when Tyler had walked into the room and begun writing. He was almost sure of it.

  Finally he shook his head and went back to work. Obviously the cloak of gloom permeating the room was disorienting him somehow. Tomorrow he would install a brighter bulb.

  4

  Brett Parkinson had been Tyler Beckman’s closest friend while he was growing up in Darkness Falls, his only friend really, so it stood to reason that as soon as Brett heard Ty had returned he would get in touch. How he managed to get ahold of Brett’s cell number was a mystery—maybe he had some kind of relationship with the real estate bitch—but sure enough Brett had called within three days of Tyler’s return, bound and determined to renew acquaintances.

  As reluctant as Tyler was to take any time off from writing his new book, the one that was going to thrust him squarely back in the national spotlight, he realized that meeting Brett for a drink would result in less time lost than trying to ignore him, since the Brett Parkinson he had known twenty years ago would never give up, and that annoying personality trait had likely not changed.