Darkness Whispers

  Table of Contents

  Darkness Whispers

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  The Meek Shall Inherit...

  What They Left Behind

  DARKNESS WHISPERS

  by

  Richard Chizmar

  and

  Brian James Freeman

  Copyright © 2017

  Richard Chizmar and Brian James Freeman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictituously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  JournalStone

  www.journalstone.com

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-945373-87-9 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-945373-88-6 (ebook)

  JournalStone rev. date: June 16, 2017

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942711

  Printed in the United States of America

  2nd Edition

  Cover Design: Jon Malfi

  Image Credit: Elderlemon Design

  Interior Artwork copyright © 2016 by Jill Bauman

  Interior Design copyright © 2016 by Desert Isle Design, LLC

  Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

  —Virginia Woolf

  No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.

  —Euripides

  Because I could not stop for death,

  He kindly stopped for me;

  The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

  —Emily Dickinson

  For Ed Gorman

  From two grateful friends

  1.

  The first golden rays of dawn were peeking over the mountain ridge to the east, although this was Western Pennsylvania, so only the locals considered those mountains to actually be mountains. In Colorado, they would be foothills. In Nepal and Tibet, they’d be speed bumps at best.

  The old man walking along the twisting country road had been to all of those places and many others, and he found people’s incessant desire to center the universe around their own limited range of knowledge and experience to be both amusing and disgusting, depending on the day and his mood.

  If anyone happened to drive past the old man, they might think he was a traveler from another time, which was nearly the truth but not exactly right either. He wore a smart black suit and a black Fedora hat with a white band of Petersham. He carried an intricately carved cane made of antique wood and a silver grip, but he didn’t limp.

  The old man stopped at a wooden sign posted near the shoulder of the road, kicking some loose gravel with his neatly polished shoes. He removed a pair of delicate glasses from the silk lined pocket inside his suit jacket, placed the glasses on his slightly crooked nose, and blinked to align his eyes.

  “Welcome to Windbrook, Pennsylvania!” he read, emphasizing the state’s name as the exclamation point dictated. “Population, 2,314. PA’s Friendliest Small Town!”

  The old man returned his glasses to their pocket and resumed walking west.

  “Well, we’ll just see about that,” he said, smiling. The old man picked up his pace and started to whistle.

  Behind him, the mountains were alive with the first touch of morning light. The trees glowed like they were on fire.

  2.

  Further down the road, the opening moments of a beautiful April morning crept toward the Skullkin Valley, but most of the residents of Windbrook were still asleep and didn’t notice or didn’t care. Even the few chronic insomniacs were slumbering. Such was life in a tranquil small town in the middle of nowhere.

  It would be another half-hour until Joe Thompson made his way around the community tossing the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from the window of his vintage station wagon. Joe only had one set of clothes, so he didn’t roll out of bed until he heard Jason Sinclair’s delivery truck approaching with four hundred copies of the day’s newspaper.

  Earl Duberstein’s widow, Betty, might be awake, but she would stick to her hard and fast rule of staying under the covers until daylight kissed her windows. Her mother had said there was no need to burn the kerosene just to make breakfast a few minutes sooner, and Betty felt confident the logic was sound when applied to the PP&L electric bill, too.

  Even Carl Reynolds, the town librarian, who used to greet each sunrise with a cup of steaming coffee and a good book in his reading chair by the bay window, remained snug and still under the covers. Carl was nearing seventy, and those early days had simply passed him by. Now, he took his time most mornings, sleeping in until nine or so, and grabbing a quick breakfast sandwich at the Windbrook Diner on his walk across town to open the library doors by ten o’clock.

  Bill Smith was busy cleaning and prepping his kitchen at the Windbrook Diner, but he was only half awake. He had been running this kitchen for better than fifty years, grooving and cooking to classic rock songs on WZOE blaring from his battered radio, and he could do the work in his sleep. Sometimes, he thought maybe he did.

  Mildred Lotz, Miss Milly to her middle-school English students, was awake this fine April morning—camped out in her bathroom for the past twenty minutes, her stomach upset from too many fudge brownies at last night’s bridge club meeting—but she was the exception. And an unhappy one at that.

  A little more than two thousand other men, women, and children slept in their homes in the valley, whether those homes were large or small, whether they were well maintained or dusty in the corners, and these people shared one thing in common: their understanding of what life in Windbrook was, what life in Windbrook meant. You could set your watch and warrant to dozens of daily occurrences in the town. Predictability and consistency were the hallmarks of their community’s existence.

  Windbrook was a no-stoplight town like dozens of others in the western part of Pennsylvania, places that even lifelong residents of the state had never heard of. Nestled in the secluded Skullkin Valley, the residents of Windbrook lived in an isolated world of their own—and they liked it that way.

  The nearest town, Glenton, was fifteen miles to the south and when the snow came it might as well be fifteen hundred miles considering PennDOT could take a week to plow the lone country road between the two com
munities.

  The valley’s stunning landscape was the only real attraction to knowledgeable outsiders and the only reason strangers might be spotted traveling the length of Main Street from one side of town to the other. There were two different state parks to the north, both of which brought campers and fishermen in search of the beautiful, peaceful settings only the lands around Windbrook could offer. Shallow streams bubbled down the rolling hills, slicing through the thousands of acres of thick, dark forest. There were still places in those woods where no man had ever stepped, not once in the history of the world.

  Life here was leisurely and idyllic—if you came from Windbrook and accepted the nature of small town life. The bright white bell tower rising from the First Church of Christ was the highest point in town and could be seen from anywhere in the valley. There were Saturday little league baseball games and Sunday church picnics. There were Bingo nights at the firehouse the first Friday of every month and bake sales almost every weekend in front of the grocery store. There was a five-person town council and a mayor, and they always won reelection unopposed. There was a single school building, housing all 134 students this year, grades K through 12. The school had been old when the parents of the current students hadn’t even been born.

  This was an old-fashioned town where everyone knew everyone else’s name and also their business, both personal and professional. Windbrook resembled a Norman Rockwell painting—and again, that was just fine with the townspeople.

  On this particularly fine April morning, a gentle breeze rattled the tree branches as the air above the mountains burst to life with the vivid colors of the rising sun, mostly red and orange and some purple, the eternal light burning a path into the crisp blue sky.

  The doors of the shops on both sides of Main Street were locked, yet they weren’t barred and gated like the stores in larger towns and cities. Soon the proprietors would arrive to unlock those doors, uncover their wares, and sell to their friends, neighbors, and the occasional guest passing through. There were no chains or franchises, not even a McDonald’s.

  Windbrook was just beginning to awaken for the day, but soon the valley would be buzzing with life. This morning was like thousands of other mornings that had come before it, and all was well in Windbrook, just like usual, just like normal.

  Nothing was different. Nothing had changed.

  3.

  Except something was different in Windbrook.

  Something had changed.

  Sheriff Benjamin Logan couldn’t exactly tell what yet, but something was off. He’d never experienced this nervous electric undercurrent in Windbrook, not as a kid growing up here and not in the decade since he was elected Sheriff, but he had felt the sensation before. In Fallujah, Iraq, to be exact, during Operation Phantom Fury. On that scorching summer day, the awareness of something being wrong with the world had grown stronger and stronger for Ben while his unit was clearing a bridge over the Euphrates River, reaching an unnerving level the moment before his leg was filled with shrapnel from an IED. The doctors managed to save his leg, but his time in the Army was done.

  Before his deployment Ben had married his high school sweetheart, Jennifer, and she had gotten pregnant with their son, Paul, soon after. Some in town whispered about the timing—there was always plenty of whispering in small towns like Windbrook—but the wedding hadn’t been a shotgun affair. Ben and Jennifer had been talking marriage since sophomore year.

  When Paul was three, a little sister, Mary, joined him. Ben and Jennifer were only twenty-two and they rarely saw each other while he served overseas, but despite the concerns of their friends and family, and despite the mumblings of the old men drinking coffee in the diner or the glib conversations of the old women baking cookies in the basement of the church, their relative youth and Ben’s time away hadn’t dampened their love. If anything, it only strengthened it.

  Jennifer and the kids had been Ben’s reason to keep fighting to live as he was bleeding out on that bridge while another soldier dragged him to safety through the ricocheting bullets of sniper fire. Ben’s family had been all the motivation he had needed to beat the timetables for getting back on his feet during his rehab stint in Germany, too. Every time he closed his eyes on those painful and haunting nights, he visualized Jennifer and the kids and the town, exactly as they had been when he’d left, just waiting for him to return home. He clung tightly to this image when the agony became unbearable and he used the memory of home to push himself forward.

  Once he actually was home, Ben had indeed found everything to be the way he had expected—nothing different, nothing changed—although the kids had grown leaps and bounds, of course. Still, even with that comforting sense of familiarity, he had felt lost and without purpose as the days and weeks passed. He couldn’t sleep at night and he found himself taking long walks during the day, searching for something without knowing what it could be.

  After a few months of restless puttering around the house and town, and then a month of trying to help with Jennifer’s real estate business where he mostly got in the way, his wife encouraged him to join the Sheriff’s Department as a deputy, to fill the vacant place inside of him that wanted to help and protect people. He reluctantly applied for the job, was quickly accepted and welcomed to the position, and he had realized how right Jennifer had been as soon as he put on the uniform for the first time. Then, when Leroy Callahaun gave in to his wife’s desperate pleas for him to finally retire, Jennifer had urged Ben to run for the job. No one had campaigned against him, and he had been re-elected twice since.

  Jennifer and the kids had been the foundation upon which Ben had rebuilt his life, and when he awoke from his frequent nightmares, from the recurring memories of his wounded and dying friends, the mangled and burned corpses of innocent children, and every other horrible thing he had witnessed in the war, Jennifer was always there beside him in the dark, always ready to hold him, always prepared to remind him that life was good, life was normal, the two of them were happy and the kids were safe.

  But, now, something was not normal. In fact, something was very wrong.

  Sheriff Logan stood outside his patrol car on Main Street, his hand resting above his holster. The old-fashioned streetlights glowed bright and he couldn’t entirely remember how he had gotten here. When was the last time he had covered the graveyard shift anyway? The late shift wasn’t exactly a common duty for the sheriff, even in a small town where your staff consisted of four deputies and a janitor.

  All of the stores were closed, but the lights shone brightly from the windows of the Windbrook Diner, which was to be expected. Bill Smith would be hard at work already. His car was parked in one of the slanted spaces along the tree-lined sidewalk, but the rest of the spaces were empty, which was also to be expected. Everything looked normal. Everything looked okay.

  Yet that electric undercurrent was creeping through Sheriff Logan’s bones, sending an icy chill across the back of his neck as if cold fingers had caressed him. His hand released the safety strap on his holster without a thought. He had never drawn his weapon in the line of duty as Sheriff, but this felt different. This felt familiar. He had fired weapons plenty of times during the war, and this felt too much like a combat situation for reasons he couldn’t understand. Something was terribly wrong. He could feel the wrongness as much as he could feel the breeze on his sweaty skin.

  As he scanned Main Street again, Sheriff Logan spotted an old man in the middle of the road, standing directly on the faded double yellow line. The old man was watching the lawman with a keen interest.

  Icy fingers brushing his neck again, Sheriff Logan started walking toward the old man. He didn’t recognize him from around town and that bothered the sheriff. What was a stranger doing standing in the middle of Main Street at dawn? Where had he come from? What did he want?

  The sheriff had nearly reached the old man—was close enough, in fact, to clearly appreciate the man’s odd choice of clothing—when a loud banging sounded from the direct
ion of the diner. Sheriff Logan drew his weapon and spun and dropped to a knee in one fluid motion. A smiling Bill Smith looked at him from the diner window. He banged one more time on the glass and gave the sheriff a friendly wave.

  Sheriff Logan stood and quickly holstered his weapon. Embarrassed, he flipped a distracted wave in the direction of the diner and turned back to the old man.

  He was gone.

  “What the—?” The sheriff turned in a slow circle, searching the sidewalks and dark pools of shadow hiding beneath each tree.

  Nothing. The entire street was silent and still.

  Puzzled, he started walking back to his patrol car—and there he was. The old man. Leaning against the hood of the sheriff’s cruiser. Waiting for him.

  “How the hell—?”

  Sheriff Logan approached the old man, instinctively surveying the area again for threats without losing his focus on the subject he was approaching. He raised one hand in a friendly wave while his other hand remained on his hip.

  “Hello there,” the sheriff said.

  The old man grinned, and there was nothing right about that mouth full of gleaming teeth. In fact, nothing at all was right about the old man. Not his expensive suit or his fedora hat or his cane made of wood and silver and engraved with complicated symbols that twisted and wrapped around each other.

  Sheriff Logan stopped when he saw that grin. The old man extended his hand to shake and his bony fingers seemed much too long. The old man’s slate gray eyes glanced at Sheriff Logan’s hands, which hadn’t moved to return the greeting.