The Living and the Dead Read online

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  The Living and the Dead © 2013, 2010 by Greg F. Gifune

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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.

  Other Novels by Greg F. Gifune

  Blood in Electric Blue

  Children of Choas

  Deep Night

  Dominion

  Long After Dark

  Midnight Solitaire

  Saying Uncle

  The Bleeding Season

  Check out his DarkFuse author page for even more titles:

  http://www.shop.darkfuse.com/greg-f-gifune

  Thanks to Shane Staley and to you, the reader.

  For Ringo and Benny Dynamite.

  PART ONE: Night Stories

  “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead

  and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

  —Thornton Wilder

  1

  Got dark later now. Summer was in full swing, but the feel was the same even a short while before sunset. Can’t fool the night, can’t put it off. It knows too much, holds too many secrets. Has too much power.

  Dempsey sat on the small porch of his cottage, the night stories already swirling in his head, recited from some distant place deep within him. So deep that maybe that part of his mind belonged to someone or something else, who could be sure of such things? No matter, he watched the forest and the slowly turning sky, night rolling in across beautiful orange smeared clouds, slow and steady, the way dreams creep up on you in your sleep, slip inside and do their damage, or if you’re lucky, set you free. Damnation or deliverance, Dempsey knew it was always one or the other. Everything in between was nothing but window-dressing, didn’t mean a thing. Folks tried to simplify things these days, explaining everything away, making excuses, thinking they knew it all, had the answers and were too sophisticated to believe in God or anything bigger and brighter than they were, anything mysterious or beyond their understanding, claiming nothing much mattered anyway. But the way Dempsey saw it, the world broke down into two types: those who wanted the truth and those who didn’t. No matter what you believed or what you didn’t, good and bad weren’t hard to see or define, they were both right there in front of people, easy to recognize and even easier to feel. The trick was in the doing. Even if he was just an old man now, old and lonely and tired, body constantly aching and mind blurred, these things Abel Dempsey knew, and knew well.

  It was quiet here but for the occasional birdsong, the buzz of crickets or the distant sounds of ocean slapping shore. A light breeze from the ocean beyond the small but dense patch of forest at the edge of his property slid through the trees, cupped a face flushed from too much whiskey over too many years, and whispered to him like a lover.

  Earlier that day, Duck had found him lying on the beach, stretched out in the sand and drunk as a man can be. Hadn’t been the first time he’d allowed himself to sink to such depths and surely wouldn’t be the last, only this time Dempsey had hoped the tides might take him, carry him out to sea once the whiskey had done its job and left him too dull to care. But it wasn’t meant to be. Not yet, anyway. Duck had pulled the empty bottle from Dempsey’s hand, tucked it under his arm then carried the old man back home. Dempsey hadn’t realized until later that it had been early morning when Duck found him. The Duck always walked the sands first thing in the morning, trying to shake off his own demons. And that poor bastard had plenty, too.

  But me, Dempsey thought, I’m just an old fool even the ocean don’t want.

  Still, he knew what was coming. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did. He could feel it. Something was on its way to this place, and when it was through with its business nothing would be the same. He’d listened to the night stories in his head for years now, and they were changing as of late, becoming something more than birds or bugs or nature sounds, the rest filled in with his own nightmares and regrets. No, this was something else. Maybe it was a good thing Duck had saved him. Somebody had to be around to tell the night stories. Or just maybe, someone had to be there to stop them.

  Dempsey figured that’s why he was still here. When all was said and done, somebody had to be there to either tell the tale or finally put it all to bed.

  Didn’t they?

  Night kept coming.

  2

  Rain sprayed the tall double windows in Christopher Dempsey’s office, sluicing along the glass and blurring the parking lot beyond. In the distance, thunder rumbled. The office, located in a modest building occupied primarily by accountants, financial consultants and various small, sales-based businesses, had never been an ideal spot, but the rent was reasonable, the space adequate for his uses, and the location—the town of Hanover on the southern shore of Massachusetts—was easily accessible in either direction, whether his clients came north from the greater Boston area or south from Cape Cod. Chris was the only doctor on the premises, a forty-six-year-old clinical psychologist with a PHD and twenty years experience that included stints in research, teaching, and for the last fifteen years, a relatively successful private practice.

  “You don’t like the storm, do you?” Evan Dodd asked from his position in the comfortable chair across from him. An eel-thin man with rather birdlike features, thinning, prematurely gray hair and a penchant for short-sleeved shirts and polyester slacks, he looked like a character straight out of Revenge of the Nerds. All the former biologist was missing was the pocket protector and a bit of tape holding his eyeglasses together. But there was nothing comical about Evan Dodd. In the last year his mental health issues had cost him his career and his family, and had landed him on disability. He’d been in biweekly, hour-long sessions with Chris for the past ten months.

  “Not a fan of thunder and lightning,” Chris said through a guarded smile.

  “I find beauty in both, actually. But beauty can often be quite frightening.”

  “Sometimes it can be, yes.” Chris crossed his legs and did his best to assume a casual position in his chair. He rarely took notes during sessions, preferring instead to let a small and innocuous digital recorder run on the coffee table he could reference later. “But we got sidetracked. You were saying?”

  Dodd fidgeted uncomfortably in his chair as he often did, beady eyes blinking rapidly before he slowly calmed and assumed a more relaxed posture. “I’ve been unusually agitated of late.”

  “How long have you felt this way?”

  “For a few days now. It comes and goes but…”

  “The anxiety feels stronger than usual?”

  “It does.”

  “Do you find the Lorazepam helps?”

  “At night, before I go to bed, it helps me sleep. It doesn’t seem to have much effect during the day, though, other than to make me drowsy.” Dodd adjusted his glasses. “I tried to speak with Laura the other day. I called and did my best to remain calm and considerate, as you suggested, but she wasn’t terribly open to it. She acts as if she hates me now. My own wife. And the kids have turned, too. They treat me as if I’m a stranger rather than their father. It’s like they all have some other agenda now, something else that occupies their time and thoughts, and whatever it is makes me essentially irrelevant in their eyes. Right before our separation something happened. Something ins
ide them changed, shifted, something I can’t yet explain.”

  Chris offered a brief but supportive nod, although he knew full well Evan Dodd would never find peace until he began examining his own issues, and came to realize that they were the real culprits behind the collapse of his life.

  “Talk a little more about that,” Chris said, “these changes in your family.”

  Dodd bowed his head a moment. “There’s darkness to it.”

  “Darkness?”

  “Yes, unmistakable darkness. I feel it.” He looked up, resumed eye contact. “Victor Hugo once said, ‘There is such a thing as the pressure of darkness.’ I believe he was correct.”

  Chris had heard the quote before. “Are you feeling that pressure, Evan?”

  “I am.” A spasm-like smile curled his lips then vanished. “But there’s more to this than meets the eye, so to speak.”

  “How so?”

  “There’s something behind all of it.”

  “This darkness and the changes in your family?”

  Dodd nodded. “I don’t know what exactly, but I’m convinced there’s something orchestrating it. Possibly through the use of some sort of—for lack of a better term—mind control.”

  “OK, let’s talk about that.”

  “People have been led to believe such things only exist in the realms of science fiction or espionage novels, or at best, as possible in theory only. The truth of the matter, however, is that examples of it already exist in nature.”

  Chris uncrossed his legs, switched legs and crossed them again. Dodd had been a successful biologist and had an unusually high IQ, so whatever he was referring to was more than likely based in reality. The key was to find the bridge between that and what was happening psychologically in Dodd’s mind that had caused him to somehow connect the two. “Go on.”

  “A while back, scientists specializing in spiders reported in the journal Nature that they’d discovered a parasitic wasp in the jungles of Costa Rica that can control its host’s behavior,” Dodd began. “This wasp seeks out a particular spider native to the area known as an orb-weaver because it spins a flawlessly round web. The parasitic wasp temporarily paralyzes the spider long enough to lay an egg on the spider in an area beyond its reach. When the spider is again able to move, it resumes building its web for approximately the next two weeks. During this time the wasp larva gradually sucks the life from its host.”

  “Sounds like typical parasitic behavior.”

  “To that point, yes,” Dodd agreed, “but not long before the larva kills the spider, it accomplishes something remarkable that baffles scientists to this day. It is somehow able to manipulate the spider’s actions, because the spider ceases building its round web and proceeds to add two thick and strong cross strands—braces, if you will—which are designed to accommodate the wasp, which is much heavier than the spider and therefore needs the extra reinforcement in order to sit on the web. The cables serve as robust staging that is resilient to the elements and high enough above the ground to protect the larva from dangers from below. Once this is achieved the larva kills the spider then constructs its own cocoon on the staging it directed its host to build for it. Scientists involved in these studies believe the spider is literally a victim of a sort of mind control, because in essence, it has been reprogrammed by the wasp to stop what it is naturally designed to do—spinning its round web—and instead constructs something new while under the control of the wasp. Most theories suggest the wasp more than likely injects the spider with some sort of chemical that produces this zombie-like minion that can be programmed to do the parasite’s bidding. Even more fascinating, in experiments where the larva is removed from the spider prior to its being killed, the spider continues to construct the staging for the larva for a short time and then slowly reverts to spinning its web. So apparently however this control is achieved, it’s not instantaneously turned off but instead gradually leaves the spider’s system before it is set free and again in control of its own behavior.”

  “Fascinating,” Chris said. “But how does that relate to your family?”

  Dodd removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Humor me.”

  “My point with that example is that mind control is not only possible, it’s already happening in nature and has been for who knows how long? So if it exists in any form in nature, then surely it could happen with human beings as well, as we’re as much a part of nature as the parasitic wasp and the orb-weaver spider is.” Dodd put his eyeglasses back in place. “I think there’s a good chance my wife and children and many other people these days are under some sort of…influence, let’s say…and the question is: who or what is behind it?”

  “Do you have any theories on that?”

  Dodd looked to the rain-blurred windows as if expecting to find his answers there. “The darkness. It’s become our master.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The darkness,” Evan Dodd said again. “I believe the darkness is behind it. The pressure of darkness Hugo spoke of.”

  “All right, and what’s behind the darkness?”

  “I don’t know. But I have a feeling we’ll all know soon enough.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning sometimes it leaves me wondering if something’s coming. Something horrible. Something evil.”

  “Would you say you have any animosity or anger toward your family?”

  “No. I love my wife and kids. But I do feel sorry for them.”

  “Why sorry for them?”

  “Because they’re the spider.”

  An uncomfortable silence hung in the air a while.

  “And who are you?” Chris asked.

  “I’m the spider, too. We all are, I’m afraid, or soon will be.”

  Chris glanced at the small clock on his desk. “We have to stop for today.”

  Dodd let out a sigh and rose to his feet. “All right then.”

  “Remember,” Chris said, depressing the STOP button on the recorder, “one appointment next week instead of two. I won’t be back until midweek.”

  You won’t be back at all.

  Chris sat forward suddenly, blood cold. “What did you say?”

  “I said, all right then.” Dodd looked puzzled.

  “Yes, well,” Chris stammered, confused and a bit shaken by what he was certain he’d heard, “we’ll continue next week.”

  Dodd extended his hand. “Goodbye, Chris.”

  Dodd tended toward formal behavior, and often liked to shake hands at the conclusion of their sessions, but there was something odd in his delivery, something slightly off. Just the same, in Chris’s professional opinion, Dodd was of no danger to himself or anyone else—on the contrary, he was meek as they came out in the real world—so he let it go and accepted his hand. “Take care.”

  Moments later, alone in his office, Chris sat at his desk keying his notes on the day’s sessions into his laptop. The unusual edge to his session with Dodd distracted him a while, but eventually other memories drove him back to the previous night and the phone call he’d received from his father. He hadn’t had any contact with him in nearly five years, and now, these types of disturbing calls had been coming late at night for the last few days, tearing him from sleep, scaring the hell out of him and his wife Nancy and then ending as abruptly as they began, with his father babbling then hanging up before Chris could make any sense of it. His father was a hopeless alcoholic—always had been—and Chris had spent the majority of his life distancing himself from the man, the town he’d grown up in and damn near anything else that concerned his past or childhood.

  “Chris—Chris, is that you, son?”

  “For God’s sake, it’s two-thirty in the morning.”

  “Your sister, she—”

  “Look, it’s the middle of the night and you’ve obviously been drinking, I—”

  “I think she’s back, Chris. I feel her.”

  With a sigh he quickly keyed his final thoug
hts then closed his laptop and sat back in his leather swivel. Twenty-eight years, he thought. Long time. He’d left Tall Tree Junction, Maine at eighteen and never really looked back. It wasn’t as if he’d never returned (he had a handful of times over the years), but it was usually for funerals or emergencies he couldn’t avoid, and any real connection to the place he’d once felt was long gone. A self-made man, he’d worked for every bit of success he had. No one had given him anything, and in retrospect, though it had been a tough road, he wouldn’t have it any other way. There had always been dark thoughts and feelings when it came to his hometown and childhood—how could there not be?—but this was different. This was beyond the norm, and yet he knew after the cryptic, middle-of-the-night phone call from his estranged father, he had no choice but to go back and find out for himself just what in the hell was going on.

  Hugo was right, he thought.

  There really was such a thing as the pressure of darkness.

  After a brief knock the office door opened and Anita, his secretary and receptionist, poked her head in. “All your Monday and Tuesday appointments are rescheduled and I let the answering service know that you’d be out of the office and unavailable for the weekend through midweek. I also spoke with Dr. Reynolds and she’s fine with covering your emergencies until you get back, so I let the service know that, too. She said good luck and to give her a call when you get back to let her know how you made out. So you’re good to go.”

  “Great,” he said through a weary smile. “Appreciate it.”

  Anita, sixteen years his junior, had been with Chris for the past five years, since his previous secretary had retired. Married but separated, she was a pretty and petite woman with a nervously thin build, short dark hair, big brown eyes and a demeanor, personality and sense of humor equal parts gun moll, cocktail waitress and businesswoman. Though just thirty, she looked like she was in her early twenties. Exceptional at her job, over the years she’d also become a trusted friend, and for a few hours one night a few months ago, more than that. “The sessions you wanted transcribed are all set too, and the disk’s filed.” She motioned to the recorder. “I’ll get to today’s sessions first thing next week. Always look forward to Dodd’s.”