The Darkness Read online

The Darkness

  Tony Cusumano

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  PUBLISHED BY:

  The Darkness

  Copyright ? 2012 by Tony Cusumano

  Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form, with the exception of quotes used in reviews.

  Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author's imagination and used fictitiously.

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  I would like to give special thanks to everyone who supported the creation of this work and the development of my writing abilities, especially my parents. The support everyone has given me over these past few years to follow my passion has truly given me a sense of purpose-that I have something to fulfill in my small life.

  Also, I would like to thank the bands A Perfect Circle and Tool for keeping me company during the time writing this. The inspiration you provided will leaves me undoubtedly grateful.

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  The Darkness

  * * * * *

  Preface

  Darkness, or blackness, is the state of being dark, or the absence of light. In our world, it is associated with the strange, the unusual-the horrific, the evil that coexists in our universe. In our existence, it manifests itself in many forms, in many ways, in many places. It is everywhere; in our countries, in our towns, in our neighborhoods, on our doorsteps. It lurks, hidden among us; it exists in plain sight. There is no avoiding it, for everyone encounters the darkness at least once, in at least one form. The darkness comes from anywhere, and comes at any time. It can twist reality, and it can twist our minds. It can distort our perception to a point of insanity, to a point of no return, to the point of death. This evil becomes incarnate in the most disturbing of forms, but none, not one, will ever be as horrendous as the blackness that comes from within ourselves: truly, evil in its most terrible form.

  * * * * *

  You are Beautiful

  You are beautiful.

  You always have been, and you always will be.

  You were beautiful the night I first met you. You slouched low in your bar stool, drowning in round upon round, shot upon shot, of bourbon. You rested your head on your fist, as streams of alcohol poured into your mouth; the expression you showed was of desolation, a sightless void, lacking emotion. The bar around you teemed with life, while you sat there, dead and oblivious. It was clear that something was wrong. I picked up on it quickly-and I seized the moment.

  My hand, heavy, rough, and callused, fell heavy on your shoulder. You turned to face me; I could see the torment in your eyes. In them, I saw moments of hate, disgust, fear, dismay, and disillusion, encased in circles of smudged make-up. The fallen tears, now dry, traced faint, caked trails down your pale cheeks. Your hair was just as frayed: it hung in several dismayed strands, which swayed with the twitching of your head. Through the curtain of hanging locks, a gash, throbbing and red, slashed across the forehead, leaving in its wake trails of dried blood. A grip of assurance ran through my hand; I smiled, and so did you.

  Your background was as colorful as I pictured it: a plethora of pain, abuse, and torment splashed your canvas with dazzling arrays of red, black, and blue. From your father's heavy hand as a kid; from the jumps you narrowly escaped during school; to the fists thrown in rage during your first marriage; and to the brutality of the rape, hidden behind a back-alley dumpster, your life was truly inspiring. For me, it was astounding that you stood through it all-the notion of me surviving that would be insane. So I understood, when your inner defense collapsed, and you unleashed rivers of water on my shoulder, nestling your soft cries against my chest. My hands rested on the back of your dress, a beautifully bejeweled piece of clothing; a shell that masked the grotesque reality of yourself: a woman, broken, beaten, and scarred.

  We walked out the door of the pub, following the sidewalk back to your home. The tenants, just a few blocks away, is where you called "home". We went there, silently, side by side. The time was midnight: I knew so, for the roars of the regular commuters had died into a stillness that lingered the rest of the way back. The black of the night?illuminated in short bursts by streetlights and the occasional pair of headlights. Your head hung in the darkness.

  Neither you nor I spoke, till we reached the front of your house. Under the sole street lamp, your head raised to face mine. Our eyes connected, and I saw in that moment, not a battered woman, but a creature of absolute beauty; a goddess worthy of glorification. You said thank you, and I returned a nod. I watched you unlock the door. You took a step in. I followed. You didn't notice, until I was the one to shut the door. Your neck felt soft, vulnerable in my hands. The grip of assurance slowly became an agonizing grip of torture, which clamped down until the sound of cracking and scraping vertebra were audible. A lone stream of blood trickled out your mouth, like the bourbon that had trickled in hours before. A final crunch echoed through the house.

  You are beautiful.

  You always have been, and now, you always will be.

  * * * * *

  A Path to Ascension

  The light:

  A luminescent presence, obscurity,

  It comes for me

  Takes over all that I can see,

  Blinds me with holy sanctity.

  I follow this light

  From my dawn till my dusk,

  From beginning to end,

  From birth until dust.

  It is warm and foreboding;

  Ominous and comforting;

  An angel beside me;

  A blade held behind me.

  It isn't far off

  I can see it clear,

  An unblemished sphere,

  Perfection, here.

  That was then, and this is now:

  Shrouded in faces of people abound,

  They block out the light,

  They create a dark night.

  They are ugly, demented,

  Twisted, horrific,

  The way they are presented

  Scares me incessant.

  I must reach the orb,

  It is my only salvation.

  These people,

  Things,

  Hinder my progression.

  They all must perish,

  Die by my hand,

  In order to reach a more comforting land.

  I rip through the skin and tear through the flesh,

  Behind I leave bodies, lifeless and fresh.

  Break through the bone and suck out the marrow,

  The energy it gives gets me through the next morrow.

  I kill for a purpose and I kill for a pleasure,

  The path that I carve is to what I desire:

  A land where the light shines forever.

  * * * * *

  The Bowl

  She is still following me. God knows how long she has been or will be.

  Around every corner; every turn; every crack and crevice she can fit herself in.

  She can't be from hell. Her bowl says otherwise.

  It was two weeks ago. The wind was dead: killed by the storm of the night before. The sun hid among clouds of gray. It was still bright; the sparkle of icicles and luminosity of the snow told me so. The cemetery gates stood upright in sharp contrast of the world around it; rigid, dark, lumbering above the white around it. Once a fine black, now splattered in rust, they were truly the entrance to the final resting place of many a soul. The stones, thousands of them, lay like ruins in the aftermath of a winter apocal
ypse; a grayscale shade on a silent afternoon.

  I walked onward, head down, watching the snow be crushed underfoot. It all seemed surreal: a place, a time, a thing I had already done. I made my way past the gate and turned right, crossing the road at the three-way intersection-ahead, a small tunnel; above, a small road. My mind kept flashing to me remnants of a previous period. The sensation of nostalgia grew ever stronger as I continued deeper into the depths of the dimming pathway: the next part was at the tip of tongue, but it wouldn't fall off in time.

  There was a car: a red, four-door Pontiac. It faced my direction. The blank stare it gave me reminded me of the silence, the deathly hush that blanketed the moment. The feeling of remembrance resonated even more powerful than before: I kept walking, pretending to know the script that I hardly knew; that I was aware of the next act in this ominous play. The event which was to come haunted and taunted, keeping just out of memory's reach but foreboding enough to warrant a growing caution. The car stood mute as I strolled by; I gave it nothing more than a passing glance. I would have kept up my brisk pace, had I not heard a faintly audible click behind me.

  Why did I turn around?

  She stood there, half in, half out, of the front car door. A sharp, black heel raised her one leg up from the ground. The dull green of the flowing dress she wore draped limp on her, veiling voluptuous lower and upper-body curves. The skin was the color of the world around her, an ashen overlay tainted with the pearl white of new-fallen snow. Her brown hair hung in spirals, never-ending, to the middle of her back. It glistened in the dim light cast through the tunnel entrances. Her lips, blood red, were enviable; she was a devil in Prada, an object of lust sought by many an insatiable pig. Her eyes were wrong, all wrong. They crossed; a grotesque intersection is what they formed. Pupils replaced color. Red, spindly fingers stretched from the black to the edges of the white. She looked at nothing; she stared right at me.

  The woman pulled the rest of herself out of the car. She brought with her a bowl: white, a green band wrapping the length of the mouth. I didn't move-she provoked curiosity, and that kept me where I was. With her crooked gaze still entrancing me, she reached a thin hand into the bottom of the dish. I could make out the sound of scraping fingernails upon the basin of the porcelain. She groped for something at the bottom of a pit. What she pulled out was nothing more than a flat flake of bread; something you would see in church, yeast-less host. She dangled it in front of her. If she was taunting me, it was more queer than intimidating. The impressed cross was hard to see, nothing more than a poor-quality attempt at creativity. She grinned till her mouth gaped open, and she swallowed the bread into her black hole mouth. The consumption was fluent. She pulled another one from the well of hosts, and again dangled the piece in front of herself. This time, she beckoned me forward with the curling and unraveling of a spider-like finger. I denied her polite gesture with a brief no thank you, and turned, walking out of the tunnel. That feeling of reminiscence fled the further I got from her; that feeling of curiosity came back stronger than ever.

  It was two days later that I saw her again. The freezing rain pelted the side of the coffee shop I was sitting in. I sipped on the black liquid, which lashed back with a bitter and heated tongue. It singed the mouth and charred the throat, but I was too engrossed in another matter. My meeting with this woman inspired writing, so I wrote: I wrote about our meeting, and here I was revising the whole thing, examining every aspect for the slightest error in an account of something very un-ordinary. I hammered away at my keyboard, adding new and erasing old, keeping a steady pace of clicks and clacks. Then one click threw me off.

  It came from behind, and I swiveled around in the stool. She stood there, next to her car, smiling and barring her perfect teeth my way. She seemed different this time: the aura I felt wasn't the warm nostalgia it was earlier, but a colder feeling, like the rain that whipped around outside. Her hair, matted, wet, black, stuck to her face and neck. Her eyes were still the same; the heels, still black and tall. Her dress was tattered now, littered with tears and fades. The green was darker than before, but that was probably due to the torrent raging outside. She still hugged her bowl close to her breast, and she still held out for me an offering-the dampened host from days earlier. I shook my head at her sight, and glanced around the shop to see if anyone else was observing her as I had been; they ignored her, content with whatever they were already preoccupied with.

  I went back to looking at where she was two blocks down the road. She was now in her car, facing forward. I faced forward too, ignoring this second encounter to finish retelling the first.

  It was three days back when she found my apartment and the small complex on the corner of Park and Borden. The time was 3:17 A.M.; I lay in my bed, watching Andy-Griffith re-runs. I guess some things never get old, like the useless posters and nick-knacks that populated my minute home. Trinkets from Indian Paw-Wows, pictures, statuettes, and pocket change spread itself the length of the bedroom. I sighed, and stared up at the white ceiling, watching the patterns dancing in arcing swirls. The TV, scarcely audible, was being out shadowed by the ever loudening thudding on my main room window. The beat being produced grew brasher in pace and intensity. I blinked at each repeating noise, till the sound drove me out of the warmth of the blanketed bed. Stumbling over to the source, a rush of terror melded with a sense of clairvoyance: I knew what was next was bad, but I had no idea to what extent.

  Until I opened my curtains, that is. Hundreds of them, if not more. Hosts. All held to my window with the blood that they were bleeding. They dripped simultaneously, trailing down the glass and onto the grass below. Through the film of flowing bread, I could see her twisted self: now a mangled, beaten woman, she hurled the pieces at me with distorted limbs. Another splattered against the glass. Her bowl now opened upward; I peered into its abyss, and regret it ever since.

  A man, small and fragile, was nestled upon the bottom. The woman used her now chipped nails to scrape the flesh off of his already exposed ribcage. He writhed in agony, his mouth rapidly shutting and gaping open as he cried out. The bit of flesh she had pulled she brought to her face, now tormented with thousands of gashes and broken teeth. Her lips, dried and caked with blood, were not moistened when her sluggish tongue slid along them. She examined the skin once more, then tossed it at my window, where it stuck again. The hosts had now become meat, and thousands of pieces of the man dangled from my window. Her eyes, as black as the night around her showed no mercy for him; for me.

  I've been holed up in this apartment for a few days now. From outside my door, she now stands, sliding the chunks through my mailbox slot. Resources here have run low: grocery shopping was supposed to be two days ago, and I dare not call anyone to bring food. The chance of her getting in is a far greater worry than that of my own hunger. My stomach is disagreeing with me here; it rumbles, begging to be fed after its three-day fast. The pile of flesh in front of my door is now a few inches high.

  I can't last here much longer, but what she has given me will get me through just a few more days.

  * * * * *

  Do You Remember

  "Excuse me, young man."

  I turned towards an elder.

  "Sorry ma'am." I replied. I slid a small ways to the left to make extra room for the bag of bones. She sat down, folding her hands between her stick-like legs. Her sparse, wiry grey hair followed the whisper of the wind blowing past the bench. Except for the two of us, the bus stop was desolate. Cars whizzed by, illuminating the darkening night with beams of white light. I returned my eyes to my folded hands.

  "Correct me if I'm wrong, but have we met before?"

  The croak brought me out of meditation. Out of more irritation then curiosity, I twisted my head to look face to face. I couldn't recognize anything: not the toothless mouth or the pale cheeks. If I had seen this woman before, believe me, I would have known.

  "Not that I can recall, ma'am." I said without thought. I went back to
my normal position.

  "Hmm. Well, isn't your name Derrick? Derrick Renold?"

  This got my attention.

  "Yeah, it is. How would you know?"

  "Sweety, let's just say I get around." The air chilled cold. I breathed in-exhaled out. A puff of white escaped my mouth, and I watched the mass swirl into nothingness.

  The woman continued, "I remember the first time I saw you. You were so young then. You had small freckles, and the most adorable cheeks. If I'm right, it was the night of April 20, 1978, back in the old apartment in New York. Do you remember?"

  I searched every recess of my mind for that date. I scanned harder, faster-I hit it dead center.

  "Hurry up Mom! I wanna show Dad the picture I drew today at school. He'll love it!"

  Mother laughed, "Ok, I'm coming!"

  I had already been waiting by the door, anxious to get inside. It was grayer than usual, and I think it was raining. Mom, coated in her flannel over-shirt, walked from the car to the door, swaying bags of groceries on each arm. A stretched out arm turned a key in its keyhole, and the door swung open. The lights were off, the house black.

  I flew through the apartment, gliding my fingers along each light switch. And with each passing switch, an eruption of white lit up the room, but revealed no sign of my Dad. All that shone in the light was nothing more than books, clothes, toys, and the normal disarray of the apartment. The bedrooms were empty; the bathrooms vacated. I checked the best hiding spots twice, only to find nothing in disappointment. Then it hit me-the closet!?I dashed back into my parent's room and flung open a small wooden door to the right of the entrance. A small hallway stretched its way to a window, clothes lining the sides and the floors. My knees crashed to the floor, and I walked on all fours, overturning suits and throwing aside dresses. I thumped across the floor with my head down, and then was smacked in the face. I fell back, gripping my nose in agony. My eyes clenched shut, until the sting of tears burned them back open. I saw a shoe swinging in the air, its untied lace dangling to the floor, making a raspy scratching sound. The left pant leg covered the shoe heel, but the right pant leg had no shoe to cover. Instead, a sock hung in its place-it had a foot in it.