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  A Darkness

  Book One

  The Awakening

  By David Peters

  Copyright © 2012 by David Peters

  This story is dedicated to my wife, my anchor. This one is yours.

  All characters in the book are fictional. Any similarity to actual living, dead, ethereal beings is purely coincidental.

  Prologue

  Darkness.

  That single word pretty much sums up my life and everything in it. Every aspect of my world seems to revolve around it. Even going as far back as my first memory takes me it is the Darkness I see. I couldn’t have been any older than three or four at the time. I was standing in the small living room of our second story two bedroom apartment I called home that week. My favorite toy airplane in one hand and a spill proof cup of apple juice in the other. I hear the fumbling of keys in the front door and in stumbles my mother with her boyfriend-du-jour.

  That was the first time I really noticed it. I could see it around her but more important to the situation I could see it around him. I don’t know why I found it so odd that he had a shadow, I had taken it for granted that my mom had one and I had just assumed that’s how it was. I had grown accustomed to it and never gave it another thought until now that I could see it side-by-side with another one.

  He had the Darkness too. But his was remarkably different from my mother’s. His had a much more sinister flair to it. If you took the mocking evil laugh from some villain in a movie and gave it a look, a color, it would be his Darkness. The general shape was similar to the one surrounding my mother but the motions and colors were far more dramatic, more energetic, and more unpredictable. To say it was discomforting would be an understatement.

  Later that evening as his shadow grew and the Vodka bottles in the cupboards did the opposite, I got the distinct feeling I didn’t want to be there. He didn’t seem a particularly evil man, just a very unhappy and violent drunkard. The more they drank the more unpredictable the flashes in his Darkness became. My mother had made a slurred comment on his manhood, or lack thereof, and I had seen a ripple flow around his shadow. I didn’t understand what my mother’s comment meant at the time but I could see quite clearly that he did. His Darkness was flashing with a mad brilliance of colors. So many that it overwhelmed me. I fled the room in absolute terror.

  I hid under the dirty clothes piled on the floor in my closet and stayed there until I fell asleep. Come morning, the sound of my mother cursing in the kitchen woke me from my hidden slumber. When I peeked through the crack in my bedroom door I could see that he was gone and my mother had a brand new black eye.

  I find that trying to explain what I see and sometimes feel can be difficult, if not impossible. I will do my best to try to put it into something understandable. First and most important, most living things have the Darkness. I have never actually seen anyone that didn’t have it but in my world I don’t like to deal with absolutes so I say ‘most’ instead of all. It isn’t evil spirits or demons or some crap like that. I don’t think it’s an aura or anything either but the science in this field is, shall we say, very limited. As near as I can tell, it is a combination of the past evil acts committed and some sort of litmus test for the potential of a future act. The Darkness is the life essence that makes up a living being. As a person does, thinks or contributes to negativity in some way it is sort of like smudging your soul. Imagine a bright brass sign being slowly tarnished with every touch. It isn’t a perfect metaphor but I think you understand.

  The problem with this is that makes it seem almost too simple, too easy. Some people can be extremely pure of heart and even a minor negative deed can make the darkness ripple across them like a large rock thrown into still water. While another person who has spent the majority of their life being nothing but a dirtbag, may commit the exact same act without so much a wave of regret. Shadows of that kind are only the darkest of souls and I will go far out of my way to avoid these kinds of people. In my world there are a surprising number of them walking around.

  That dovetails nicely into describing how it is that I see the world around me. The effect I see is the same in all people, the colors and intensities tend to vary greatly but the overall visual is the same. Imagine a large pool of silver-black mercury. A huge pool of it so large it will surround an entire person. You lay a person on the pool so gently that it doesn’t break the surface tension. They rest on it like a bed but right at the edge where their body meets the mercury there is a slight curl, a distortion if you will. Now imagine this flowing all around a person. It varies in color from one person to the next. The drunkard I spoke of earlier was a deep smoky black.

  I have come across some pretty nasty people in my time and the shadows can get downright dark and if their emotional state is erratic enough the emotions can shoot across their Darkness like lightning, and it’s just as unpredictable. That is pretty much why I started calling it the Darkness. In my line of work I have yet to see anyone that hasn’t been tarnished by the harsh world around us. Simply existing exposes a person to evil acts either by their own actions or by those thrust upon them.

  For the most part I have kept this little curse to myself throughout my entire life, never telling many about it, and instantly regretting the few times I did mention anything. At first it wasn’t because I thought I was different, it was the opposite of that actually. I thought I was normal and how I saw the world was how everyone else did too. Imagine if you saw all the grass in the world as blue with red spots instead of bland green. A person simply doesn’t have a lot of occasions to say, ‘Wow, look at that blue grass’ or ‘The spots are really red today’.

  With as much as I moved around as a child, making friends was never a real strong suit for me. I never really had an abundance of people to share my thoughts with anyway. In fact, I can count the number of close friends I have had my entire life on one hand. Not having many friends as a child is something you carry with you into adulthood.

  I recall a time, it must have been somewhere around the third grade, when I was out on the ball field with my friend Johnny. He had made some random comment, something along the lines of one of the girls liking me. We were at the age where having girls like you was still considered a bad thing and not something we were supposed to want. We had just started chasing girls; we had no clue what do with them if we ever caught them.

  I remember Johnny and I were sitting on the jungle-jim talking about random things. I caught sight of her and watched as she walked across the soccer field. She had long curly red hair and always wore these old country style dresses with the puffy shoulders. She reminded me of some girl from a Western novel that would carry her books to school and stop by the well on the way home to get water for dinner. To say she was my first crush was an understatement. I was as much in love with her as a first grader could possibly be. I would just stare at her and wonder what she would be like to talk to. Not that I could ever muster the courage to talk to a girl mind you. I liked her because her shadow was nearly transparent, a beautiful smoky silver-gray with the occasional flash of white at the edge, flashes of light-blues as she walked and talked with her friends.

  Leaning over to Johnny and stating this out loud did not produce the conversation I had thought it would. Instead, I was faced with open laughing and mocking words from someone I thought was a friend. This incident turned out to be my indoctrination into a lifelong road filled with sour relationships and unhealthy friendships. I have kept things to myself ever since that day and we all know that the first step to a really unhealthy relationship is to lie.

  You might be asking yourself if my mother or father had the gift. I can really only speak for my mother. She didn’t. In fact, she more likely than not had the exact opposite of my abili
ty. She couldn’t read my mood if I held a neon sign over my head clearly stating what my current mood was. Hers was a very closed world with limited views that rarely even touched the borders of reality. As far as my father goes, I only asked once about him and found nothing more than regret.

  I must have been about thirteen or fourteen when I really started to wonder. I was starting to go through all the standard changes all boys do and I could find out all about those from books. What I couldn’t find were the explanations for how my little curse was changing. I began to not just see the Darkness, but there were times when I could smell them too. Usually only very strong emotions but they had definite smells. I really needed to find someone that understood what was happening and I held out hope that the curse was passed down through my father.

  One Saturday afternoon when my mother was desperately trying to find a single cigarette somewhere in the couch cushions I decided it was a good time to ask her who my father was. She didn’t know. She didn’t have even the foggiest idea who he might be. She added several other obscure possibilities over the years but I decided to settle on the most often told tale to be fact. She was pretty sure it was some guy from the Navy that she had met while at some random music festival. She wasn’t even sure of the city I was conceived in. She thought it might be San Diego or Virginia, but it could very well have been Denver also. I asked if the Navy had a big presence in Denver and she wanted to know why I would ask her about the Navy. With that, the thought of ever finding out anything about my father was soundly and thoroughly crushed.

  Having finally realized that I was alone in the world was a very dark day for me.

  Anyway, enough about what has happened in the past, I can’t change it. I think I’m a good person, albeit kind of a downer, but good person overall. My past made me who I am, so I can’t rightly complain too much about it. This is the present, today, the here and now. The bridges burned have long since stopped smoldering and the road ahead is paved with uncertainty and the usual fear of all things living.

  As I said, all people have it. Well, all living people. I see Darkness everywhere. I can’t go to the store to buy milk and not see people with their shadow curling and twisting around them. My world can be an extremely depressing place to live in. I find very little hope. Almost nothing I can find makes me think there is a future for me in this dark place. My days start before the sun comes up, trudging off to a job I hate but it helps put food on the table and a little extra away in the bank. I fight my way home with thousands of other people just trying to make ends meet. I kiss my wife when I get home but the tension between us is borderline tangible.

  She has a shadow too. Everyone does. I know this because I see them, and I hate it.

  Chapter One

  Looking for the Light

  “I’ll get it done on time Frank. Don’t freak out about it, I’ll get it done, I always do.” I sat hunched over in my chair trying to make as small a target as possible. I dreaded any time I had to spend talking to Frank. I was usually better at avoiding him.

  “I’m just concerned that you don’t see the urgency in the roll out, that’s all I’m saying, Adam. These are extremely critical infrastructure machines.” Frank animated his words with his hands. It was like he needed to conduct the conversation as if he were in front of some sort of symphony, carefully choosing each and every word then expecting the players to follow his lead.

  I could see he wasn’t telling the truth, “Of course I understand how urgent it is. I’ll have the servers back to you before the end of the day. I’m just finishing up the final patching then one more quick security scan and after the reboot I’ll have the sign-off in your inbox. You will have them by the end of day today Frank, no later.”

  “Ok, I just get concerned when these things come down to the wire. It seems like it happens every single time with this team. Upper management is always talking about cuts so it’s critical to me that my team looks good to them. You understand, don’t you?” he always wrapped his questions in a very patronizing tone.

  I found myself thinking, “Are you sure it’s critical that your team looks good or are you a little more concerned about yourself, Frank?” Not that I could ever say those words out loud.

  “Sure Frank. I’ll try to get them to you faster next time. I have been working on a script to automate one of the more lengthy steps, it should be done for the next project.”

  “Good deal.” He turned and headed back to his office without another word. I watched his Darkness walk away and silently wondered to myself how he managed to stay in the position he held for so long. I was starting to learn that it had more to do with who he hired to support him than it did with his own abilities. I had been playing with computers since about the same time the training wheels came off of my bicycle. They seemed as if they were a natural place for me to go, no Darkness rolled around the electronics and it didn’t take me long to realize I could create whatever world I wanted to by simply writing the proper code.

  I sighed heavily and turned my monitor back on. My current game of solitaire was waiting patiently for me to play an ace of clubs. I had learned very early in my job here that delivering early to Frank never ended well for me. He would take any extra time I gave him and either find a small missed item or create one. I mean seriously petty items. The last time he had sent an entire cluster back because the default log in desktop didn’t have the company logo on it. Anything to make himself stand out as the all-seeing-all-knowing engineer that he set himself up to be.

  “I do not understand why he is so strict with you, Adam. You know these systems better than any engineer on the team and much better than Frank does,” my office mate said through a heavy Indian accent.

  “Because deep down inside he wants nothing more than to control people that he sees as more intellectually powerful than himself. He gets his kicks out of seeing frustration from someone that could beat him in just about anything he chooses, but instead said person just sits back and takes it because he wants to put food on the table and not have to go interview for some other crap job in some other crap company. He is a narcissistic control freak that is in desperate need of a physical attitude adjustment but he knows he is safe from that in his little corporate bubble.”

  He gave me a very perplexed look, “I do not understand what you are trying to say.”

  “He’s an ass.”

  “Ah, I know this word, ass,” he smiled as he looked down the hall to see if Frank was indeed out of earshot. “I think I would agree with you, Adam. He is not very good at doing the needful. He certainly should be more kind to you if he wishes for you to remain here. Outside of the development team I think you know this better than anyone else.”

  I moved a few more pointless cards. I had one card remaining to be uncovered and it had to be the two of clubs. Another dead-end game done and another nineteen minutes removed from my dark existence. I closed my eyes and rolled my neck as I thought about my current outlook on life. Where was I headed? Did I have any achievable goal in mind? I was alive but what was I doing to live?

  I moved a few pointless cards before I swiveled in my chair to face my officemate in the other corner of the tiny cubicle, “Baskar, do you ever want more out of life?”

  “More of what, Adam?” He tilted his head slightly as he tried to understand my question. He was at least a full foot shorter than I was and rail skinny but his dark skinned face always had a smile and his wire frame glasses emphasized his bright-blue eyes.

  “More, well, I don’t know, something, anything. Do you ever feel a little hollow inside? Like something is missing? Like a huge piece of you is gone somewhere and you don’t know where to start looking?”

  “I am trying to understand you but I cannot follow your words, Adam.”

  I could see he was telling the truth. It was written all around him in the flows and ripples. “Are you happy Baskar? I mean happy with how your life has turned out?”

  “Oh, yes. Life has been very generou
s to me. I could not ask for more from the life destiny has provided for me.”

  Not a ripple or curl disturbs the core. This was again a full truth.

  I enjoyed working with Baskar. The language barrier made it difficult for him to communicate at times but it made it easy for me to see what his motives were when he would struggle as he looked for the right words. I could see the struggle with words in his Darkness and could often tell what he was really trying to say written in the colors and flows. He had far more formal training than I did but that same training kept him from ‘thinking outside of the box’, to use a term Frank really likes to throw around. His experience in a high end college and my experience working in the trenches made for a nice matchup.

  “I’m sure Frank is really a good man if you could get to know him,” he looked away at the last second of his statement.

  This was clearly not the truth.

  I smiled as I looked at the change in energy around the short man, “I’m pretty sure that the last thing Frank and I will ever do is get to know each other. If he and I were lost on an island somewhere, I would eat him before I tore open the bag of potato chips I brought with me.”

  Baskar smiled politely but I knew he didn’t understand what I had said, “Will you be joining the rest of us for lunch today, Adam?” Again I could see what he hoped the answer would be.

  Light flickered delicately around the edges.

  He did not want me there. Not out of spite but because with me there they are forced to speak English and that is not very relaxing for a few of them. “No. I’m going to take a pass today. I need to get down to the DMV for my car tabs before they expire and I get some massive ticket I can’t afford.”

  “I will see you after lunch break then, Adam,” he said as he locked his machine and slipped his windbreaker on. Several of his friends from the group were waiting in the hallway and waved to me as they walked away.