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  LONG AFTER DARK

  Greg F. Gifune

  Digital Edition

  Long After Dark © 2014, 2010 by Greg F. Gifune

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

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  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.

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  For my sister Kimberley

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Shane Staley and everyone at DarkFuse. Special thanks to my wife Carol, and as always, thank you to all my fans and readers around the world for the continued support.

  “In a real dark night of the soul it is always

  three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “The Crack-Up”

  1

  The rain began to fall just after three in the morning. Accompanied by a violent wind, it gushed from dark skies, lashed the house and drenched the neighborhood with such ferocity the noise alone would’ve wakened Harry Fremont had he been asleep.

  But Harry wasn’t asleep. He was wide awake.

  In fact, he hadn’t slept since the night before. From then on the flu had kept him awake and coughing, blowing his nose, battling a fever and enduring waves of head and body aches that just wouldn’t quit. Unfortunately, that last night of sleep hadn’t been particularly restful either, as he’d been plagued by a series of disturbing dreams and nonsensical thoughts that continued to replay and echo in his mind. He couldn’t remember details but the nightmares and thoughts were connected, and he was fairly certain they all had something to do with first being pursued and then pursuing someone else, and ultimately, imprisonment in darkness. Though horrifying, he couldn’t put his finger on many specifics, just elusive shadow memories of being lost in a labyrinth of dark corridors and wracked with pain as glimpses of lifeless lunar surface flashed before his eyes. His muscles still throbbed, but he couldn’t be sure if it was residue from nightmares or merely a symptom of the virus raging through his system.

  In the dark, sitting in a recliner in his den, Harry carefully attempted a deep breath, heard his chest wheeze, then felt a familiar itch at the base of his throat. Another wave of coughing was coming. He closed his eyes, concentrated and sat perfectly still, hopeful this might prevent it, but a sudden chill shot up along the center of his back and into his neck. He shivered, and the movement sent him over the edge and into a vicious coughing fit. By the time it finally wound down he was out of breath, his chest hurt and he was sweating profusely. More chills fired through him, his nose began to run and a sharp cramping pain stabbed him just above his pubic bone. Oh no, he thought, not that too.

  He reached for a box of tissues on the coffee table. He’d blown his nose so many times in the last twelve hours the skin around and just beneath his nostrils had already turned raw and red. He delicately pressed a fresh tissue to his nose and blew. It didn’t seem possible anyone’s head could hold this much. It was endless, and now postnasal drip had kicked in, trickling down the back of his throat like liquid glue. Tossing the tissues aside with a defeated sigh, he slouched forward in the recliner and felt sorry for himself awhile. Not that it mattered any. Harry was alone in the house. He glanced at a small-framed photograph of Marlon, their dog. He’d died just a few months before, at twelve, of cancer. God how I miss that little guy, he thought. If he were still alive he’d be right here next to me, like always. Sometimes Harry still caught himself looking for his old friend even now.

  Normally he would’ve been upstairs with Kelly, cuddled up tight and warm, the dog at the foot of the bed. But Kelly had left that morning for a three-day business trip to San Diego. Her position at a high-end coffee company had always been an important part of her life, but since her promotion from middle management to Vice President of Sales a year before, her career had become increasingly intrusive in their daily personal lives. She worked much longer hours, and although her pay had more than doubled, the position also required a great deal of business travel. Harry was proud of his wife and her success, but disliked this newest development intensely, which led to several arguments between the two. In fact, they’d had words just hours before.

  Kelly was staring out the tiny windows on either side of the front door while waiting for her cab to come and take her to the airport. As she so often did when upset, she purposely avoided eye contact. Harry had just begun to feel under the weather, but mistakenly assumed he was simply overtired and stressed.

  “I’m just saying I don’t like all this travel, OK?”

  “We’ve been over this,” Kelly said evenly. “We discussed this before I took the job, we discussed it after I took the job, and now we discuss it every time I have to get on an airplane. I don’t like being away from home either, but longer hours and occasional travel is part of what I do now.”

  “Occasional? You went to Atlanta less than a month ago, and a week before that you were in Montreal for two days. Two weeks before that you were in—”

  “What do you want me to do? Quit a job I worked a decade to get?”

  “I want you to care about what this is doing to us.”

  She turned and looked at him, her normally pretty blue eyes narrowed and glaring. “What does that even mean?”

  “It means sometimes you act like you care more about your job than our happiness.”

  “Don’t you mean your happiness?”

  “Sorry, I was under the impression my happiness was the most important thing to you, since yours is to me.”

  “Then support me in what I’m trying to do.”

  “And what is that exactly?”

  “Now you’re just being a jerk. I’m working my ass off to build the company to heights it’s never seen before—you know that—and once that starts to kick in I’ll be able to expand my staff and delegate more. Then I won’t have to do all this traveling. I’ll be able to send somebody else. Give it some time. I’ve only had the job a year.”

  “I’m getting tired of you never being here.”

  “I would think with all that’s going on you’d be happy I’m doing so well.” Kelly folded her arms across her chest, ruffling the jacket of her pinstripe skirt-suit. “Funny, I don’t remember you bitching when my pay doubled and it helped make Garret’s college bills easier, or when it helped us get the new house.”

  The words stung the same as if she’d slapped him in the face. “The sale of this house is primarily what afforded us the new one. And my job bought this house and everything in it. You know, back when you were just a receptionist, answering phones, fetching coffee and barely making enough for grocery money. My job paid for you to go back to college and get your degree. My job supported you a
nd me and Garret for years, so spare me your—”

  “Whatever, my cab’s here,” she said, bending down for her bags. “I’ll call you when I land in San Diego. My hotel info is on the pad in the kitchen.”

  They stared at each other a moment.

  “I love you, you know,” she said.

  He gave a guarded smile. “I love you too.”

  Kelly leaned in and kissed him. “We’ll figure it out when I get home, OK?”

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  “You look tired,” she said as she hurried out the door. “Go to bed early tonight, get some rest.”

  He tried, but when his symptoms began they’d all come at once, attacking him as if from thin air and rendering any hope of sleep impossible. His nose clogged, his ears began to ring, he was suddenly freezing and achy and a headache had settled behind his eyes. Forced to accept the fact that he was coming down with either a serious cold or perhaps even a bout with the flu, he’d wearily rolled from bed and returned downstairs to the den. Angrily blowing his nose and cursing whoever had given him this crap, he watched television awhile and tried to take his mind off things. He rarely got sick, couldn’t even remember the last time he’d had a cold, but on those scarce occasions when Harry did get sick, he got very sick. Clearly this was going to be one of those times.

  By midnight he was exhausted, lightheaded and feverish, so he took some aspirin, shut the TV off and tried to sleep in the recliner.

  That didn’t work either. His body wanted to sleep, needed to sleep, but by then the incessant cough had joined the festivities and wouldn’t allow it.

  Rain battered the windows, the roaring wind escalated, the walls around him creaked and moaned, and something about these normally mundane sounds made Harry uneasy. More uneasy than they should have.

  But he couldn’t figure out why.

  Again his thoughts turned to his wife. She’d called as promised from the airport to let him know she’d landed safely, but he’d been in the bathroom and the call went to voicemail. He checked his watch. San Diego was three hours behind Massachusetts so it was a little after midnight there, maybe she was still up. He pictured Kelly sprawled on a hotel bed watching TV, legs stretched out before her, a remote in one hand and a drink in the other, her hair mussed and makeup faded, suit jacket slung over the back of a nearby chair, blouse and skirt wrinkled, pumps kicked off to the floor below along with a tangle of pantyhose.

  With a grunt Harry struggled up out of the recliner and over to the cordless phone on a small end table next to the couch. He dialed the voicemail and listened to her message again.

  “I’m on the ground safe and sound, just grabbed a shuttle to the hotel. I’m in Suite 136. We’ll be in meetings the rest of the afternoon and tonight I’ve got a dinner thing, so I won’t be back until late. I’ll give you a call in the morning. Love you. Bye.”

  Harry deleted the message, then shuffled out into the kitchen and over to the magnetic pad on the refrigerator where Kelly had written her hotel information down. Sniffling, he slipped on a pair of reading glasses his optometrist had recently insisted he needed, and dialed the number she’d left. It was answered on the second ring.

  “Good evening, Great Night Suites.”

  The voice was male and monotone, but whispery and soft to the point of sounding nearly mocking.

  “Suite 136, please.” Harry pulled the glasses off. He didn’t know which he hated more, the damn glasses or the fact that for the first time in his life he truly needed them. “It happens to everyone sooner or later,” the optometrist had told him. “The eyes degenerate the older one gets. But otherwise yours are quite healthy at this point.”

  At this point…meaning at some future point they’ll get worse. My eyes are slowly weakening and dying along with the rest of me. Even five years ago I didn’t need reading glasses. Now I do. What about five years from now? Will I need them all the time? Life begins at forty my ass.

  The room phone rang several times but wasn’t answered. Could she already be asleep? Unlikely. Besides, wouldn’t the ringing wake her?

  Suddenly Harry was reconnected with the man at the front desk. “I’m sorry, that suite isn’t answering. I can put you through to voicemail if you’d like.”

  “No, I’ll try again in the morning,” Harry said. “Thank you.”

  He hit disconnect. Her business dinner must’ve been long over by midnight. Where the hell was she at this hour? As if in answer, another coughing spell hit, concluding when a ball of phlegm leapt into his throat. Gagging, Harry made his way to the sink, spat it out, then flipped on the light to study it a moment. Brown. Not good. He washed it away, then dialed Kelly’s cell.

  Amidst background noise that sounded curiously like the rumble of large machinery, a computer-generated voice said, “We’re sorry, the provider for the mobile service you are attempting to reach is temporarily unavailable. Please try your call again later.”

  Weird, he thought, never got that message before. Assuming there was probably trouble with the towers or the satellites due to the storm, Harry hung up, dropped the cordless into his robe pocket and trudged back to the dark den. He stood dejectedly before the French doors and watched the small patio area and backyard. With the outdoor furniture stored in the cellar for the winter, but for the gas grill the patio was barren, slick and wet. Reminding him of the strange dreams he had last time he’d slept, the moon hung high in the night sky, blurred by what looked like a blanket of fog. But despite the moonlight, the night was so thick he couldn’t make out much of the yard beyond the patio. At the edge of the property, yard became forest, but that too was shrouded in darkness and rain.

  Their house, a modest two-bedroom Cape, was located at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Schooner Bluffs, a small coastal town on the southern shores of Massachusetts not far from Boston. When they’d first bought the house back in 1989, just two years after they’d been married, Schooner Bluffs had a population of about five thousand, but in the last few years the town had exploded with new homes and an influx of businesses previously not allowed in town. There was an enormous Wal-Mart now, a Shaw’s Supermarket, and in recent months more commercial development followed, but when the financial crisis hit and the real estate market tanked, everything other than commercial growth came to an almost immediate halt, leaving much of the town in financial ruin. There were five houses on their cul-de-sac. Two had already been foreclosed on and had sat empty and for sale by the banks for months, until a huge developer swooped in and bought up an enormous chunk of property, including the entire cul-de-sac. The following year a vast cinema complex would be built in its place, along with two strip-malls and an Olive Garden restaurant. Initially the residents fought the proposal, but the town, desperate for revenue, got behind it. Eventually everything became a tangled mess of lawyers and potential lawsuits, and as property values continued to plummet, Harry and Kelly, along with their two remaining neighbors, took the deal. Harry and Kelly, and Rose Bassinger—the woman who lived across the street—had been the final holdouts on Revere Place, and though they’d finally come to terms with the buyer as well, theirs were the only two houses still occupied on the cul-de-sac. The rest sat empty and abandoned, awaiting destruction. Like Rose, Harry and Kelly had to be out by the end of January, so right after the holidays they’d begin the move to the new home they’d purchased two towns away. As it was already early November they had less than three months left here.

  The new place, though much smaller, was nice enough, but Harry wasn’t at all happy about leaving. Except for the first two years of their marriage, this house had been their home. He and Kelly had spent half their twenties, all of their thirties and five years of their forties here. Their son Garret had been conceived and raised in this house. He’d taken his first steps in this very den, spoken his first words while in his highchair in the kitchen. Marlon had lived his entire life here. So many happy memories, he thought, so much history.

  But then leaving was just another transi
tion in a recent and stressful string of many. There was Kelly’s promotion. Garret left home for the first time to attend his freshman year of college at UNH. Marlon had been diagnosed with cancer and died soon thereafter. And to top it all off, the firm where Harry had worked for more than fifteen years (a company specializing in product and market analysis for manufacturers and advertisers), was purchased by a larger corporation, leaving his status as a department head and his future with the company uncertain. What he’d considered a secure job he’d have until retirement could now very well be pulled right out from under him, and he’d be on the street looking for work at forty-five. He’d already gotten the memo explaining how after the first of the year the new owners planned to send in efficiency consultants to determine which jobs were expendable, and rumor had it middle managers like him would be the first targeted. He could only hope his seniority and exemplary record would be enough to save him.

  Another spray of rain hit the French doors, breaking Harry’s concentration. For a moment he caught a glimpse of his ghostly reflection in the glass. He had a severe case of bed-head, was dressed in old sweatpants, even older moccasin slippers and a loose-fitting sweatshirt, and his heavy robe was open and hanging on him, the belt ends dangling nearly to the floor. Kelly had gotten him the robe for Christmas the year before. Damn thing had always been too big. As another wave of chills struck he pulled it closed and fastened the belt. He was beginning to feel slightly nauseous.