‘Mister Dark’ (a short horror story)

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INTRODUCTION

I’ve made no secret of the fact Stephen King greatly influenced my work, but there was another writer who played an equally important role in my evolution as a writer:

Dennis Etchison.

In the mid-’80s my friend and coworker Jim Shoffner gave me a copy of Etchison’s collection “The Dark Country” and I was instantly blown away. I loved Etchison’s practical writing style and the “modernity” of his stories (I don’t know if that’s a real word, but if not, it should be). Etchison didn’t write about vampires, werewolves and reanimated corpses. He wrote about ordinary people doing extraordinarily nasty things to other people – the kinds of monsters you and I might run into during our daily walk through life.

“The Dark Country’s” lead-off story, “It Only Comes Out at Night,” reduced my brain to fried jelly.

I was sitting in my parents’ living room. It was very late, going on midnight. The house was dark and I was already listening with half an ear to the odd pops and groans all old houses make when they are shrugging off the day’s heat and settling in for the night. I read “It Only Comes Out at Night” and when I finished, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck standing on end. I had to put down the book and breathe for a moment. I remember thinking I had just been dragged across a threshold of storytelling I hadn’t known existed. “It Only Comes Out at Night” was breathtaking in its … well … its strangeness. It conveyed its horror by saying less, not more. I would call it one of the finest short stories ever written, up there with Shirley Jackson’s “The Witch” and Stephen King’s “The Woman in the Room.”

That’s when I became a lifelong Etchison fan.

The story you’re about to read, “Mister Dark” is my attempt to write a story Etchison would have liked. Later, it came to pass Etchison did like it, though not enough to publish it.

The story came to me after my first trip to Etchison’s stomping grounds in Los Angeles. The year was 1986 and I was working for a newspaper as the design editor. My boss at the time decided to jump-start a redesign project I was working on by sending me to the Orange County Register for a week, where I would tap the creative genius of design guru Nannette Bisher. I flew out on a Sunday so I could be there first thing Monday morning.

For most folks such a venture would amount to nothing more than a work trip, but for me it was a huge, scary undertaking. I had never traveled for the job, I was terrified of flying, and the thought of driving in Los Angeles scared the shit out of me.

I landed at LAX late that afternoon and somehow found the rental car kiosk and got my car, a bland Oldsmobile or Buick, I don’t remember which. LAX was a labyrinth and I couldn’t figure out how to get out of there and onto the freeway. Somehow I managed, but after half an hour’s driving at 80 mph on a 12-lane superhighway I realized I was heading in the wrong direction. I pulled off and stopped at a gas station, where I asked a surly Latino man for directions. He gave me an angry look and pointed to the front of the building, where I spotted a map vending machine. I paid $2 for a map of LA, got back in the car, locked the doors, and tried to figure out where I was and where I needed to go.

I did that, finally, then got back on the freeway and headed in the correct direction, arriving an hour later at my destination, The Saddleback Inn in Santa Ana. As I was getting out of the car, a woman parked next to me, threw open her door and struck my car with such force it rocked on its suspension. She acted as if nothing had happened. I knew, then, that I was a stranger in a strange land, at least one with different values about car care.

My room was dark and depressing. The door frame showed signs of having been broken down. You couldn’t walk anywhere – you had to drive, even if it was across the street. Helicopters and jetliners flew overhead constantly. At night, searchlights from police choppers filled the sky. And everywhere there was a constant din of noise – cars, cars and more cars. The traffic never stopped, on the ground or above.

I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Come Saturday morning I was glad to get back on the plane.

My overall impression of LA is that it was so big, and so indifferent to the plight of its residents, that anybody who lived there was choosing to subordinate themselves to the vast, hungry and all-devouring machine that was Los Angeles. And that, to me, represented a kind of evil – the casual evil of indifference. The kind of evil that becomes so commonplace that some people can no longer distinguish it from good.

I submitted “Mister Dark” to Etchison for an anthology he was editing. He kept it for a long time but eventually returned it, saying he had almost bought it but in the end decided to pass. I forget the reason. For me, it was a thrill to have him say something nice about my story. And to get his autograph.

Sadly, Dennis Etchison passed away in 2019. He was one of the great writers of American horror.

If you get a chance, read “It Only Comes Out at Night.” If it doesn’t scare the bejesus out of you, check your pulse.

You may not have one.

—

MISTER DARK

Swells of darkness rolled in like the tide as Faye shivered in the rental car. It was a warm night. She angled the folded newspaper into a dim bar of fluorescent light that slanted through the window, while the crazy lady by the dumpster raved and raved and raved.

A billboard across the road, opposite the parking lot, declared: The Staples Center – A Happening Place.

A half-eaten cherry turnover, wrapped in torn cellophane that was dotted with drops of condensation, lay congealing on the dashboard. A Diet Coke cup filled with sweating ice lay on the floorboards. The ice melted and settled with a hollow, rattling sound that scared a twitch out of Faye.

She jerked her head up. She looked out the dusty windshield. A group of teen-aged boys squeezed through the convenience store door. One burst into barking laughter in response to a whispered comment, and dropped his Slurpee. Slush sprayed out over the grease-smeared parking lot.

“Oh, shit,” he said disgustedly. “Look what you made me do.”

“Just go get another one and quit your bitching,” the whisperer said. “We’ll wait.” While the boy went back inside, the others clambered into a brown Mercedes that looked green in the stark light. The crazy lady by the dumpster cawed hoarsely. She had a dented cardboard box in a shopping cart. She was carrying a golf club, which she used alternately to prop herself up and attack the box. “Prince of earwigs!” she shrieked and aimed a wobbling broadside at the box. The boys in the Mercedes laughed.

God. I hate this place. I already hate it. Faye squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to breath deeply. The city throbbed around her, so much unlike the place she had come from. She wished the sun would rise. She glanced at her watch. It read only 10:43, and worse, that was central time. She couldn’t bring herself to set it back. She sighed. I made a big mistake coming here. The dark pressed closer, barely kept at bay by the light from the convenience store. She decided if the crazy woman came near her, she’d drive away. Back into that Christ-awful traffic on the Santa Ana Freeway, which was an entirely different but no less terrifying form of insanity. She would have to leave soon anyway. She’d stopped only to get a newspaper, but had ended up buying the turnover and Diet Coke with the hope that something to eat and drink would make her feel better. They hadn’t. And now she would have to leave, because the motel had a 10 p.m. check-in time – Pacific time. It was 10 miles down the freeway, if she could trust the map she’d gotten. That might as well be 10 million miles.

“Crawling like an earwig!” the crazy lady snarled, “but where will you crawl now, Mister Dark? No closets to slither from! No beds to make your damned coffin! You’re here with me, and I’m not going to let you out!” She thumped the box with the club and broke into harsh, gargling laughter.

“No. Don’t,” Faye heard one of the boys in the Mercedes whisper. “Just leave the old bitch alone for God’s sake.”

Faye let her gaze drop to the newspaper. A copy of the Orange County Register. A headline on the local front page read: Man convicted of wife’s murder. “A Tustin man was found guilty Thursday in a bizarre murder case in which he allegedly strangled his wife, beheaded the corpse and left the head in a local movie theater aisle. …” Faye felt the little bit of turnover she’d eaten slide queasily into some deeper recess of her stomach. She’d bought the newspaper to check the apartments-for-rent listings in the classifieds, but something on the front page had caught her eye – 12-year-old among eight arrested in gang shooting – and then she’d gone through the other pages. The stories reminded her that she’d left her home in Northwest Florida for this teaching position because it offered an opportunity, a real step forward in terms of pay. But now that she was here, she felt as if she’d bargained away some essential part of herself, and she wondered which master she served, the voice of her own peace of mind, or some other compelling influence that demanded she do what was expected of anyone in her position.

“Oh, Jesus! I don’t believe you,” one of the boys in the Mercedes sniggered as another boy opened the passenger door and climbed out. The crazy lady was whacking the box and babbling. “Never again! Never again, Mister Dark!” Faye shivered.

The day had gone badly. Her flight was late getting out of Memphis. She hated flying and was hoping they’d put her on a jumbo jet, something big to smooth out those terrifying bumps and sudden dips that caused her heart to lodge in her throat. But the plane was a three-engine model, a 727 or something, that bounced across the sky like a cork in white water. The flight became worse as the plane carried her closer and closer to Los Angeles. Somewhere over New Mexico the oven broke. No lunch – not that she could have eaten anything. The steward offered her an exchange, and she took the trade in vodka collins.

A dry, hot gust of wind swept across the parking lot, stirring clouds of dust. The empty Slurpee cup rattled across the asphalt in imprecise semicircles. A BMW pulled up to the gas pumps in the middle of the lot. The boy from the Mercedes was approaching the crazy lady. She was cackling, “Never again, Mister Dark! You’ll never scare anyone again!”

The boy said slyly, “What’cha got in the box, lady?”

Faye flipped the newspaper over and scanned the headlines. A sewer board was meeting. Then: Teen charged in rape of teacher. She was seized by an involuntary shudder, and the car seemed to grow uncomfortably cold. Darkness pooled in the floorboards and filled the back seat. The rape had taken place at a school across town, far from where she would be teaching, but somehow that failed to comfort her. The feeling of dread that had stayed with her throughout the day reasserted itself, worse now than when she arrived at the airport.

LAX had been an incomprehensible maze of corridors and walkways and faceless people who rushed about as if they knew exactly where they were going. By some miracle of providence she recovered her luggage and found the rental car booth, which apparently had closed.

“Where is everybody,” Faye asked the girl at the adjacent Hertz kiosk.

“They’re gone,” the girl answered in a rigor-mortic monotone.

Faye felt as if she were back on the airplane and it had just flown into an air pocket, dropping a thousand feet. “But I had reservations for a car.”

“I can rent you a car.”

So she’d taken the Hertz car, an Alero. A minivan carried her at breakneck speed through the LAX warrens and out to the lot. She got her papers squared away and climbed into the car. An Oriental woman was getting into the car next to hers. The woman’s door flew open and struck Faye’s car with enough force to rock it on its springs. The woman never looked at her.

“C’mon. Tell me what you got in the box,” the boy was saying. Faye looked up. The crazy lady’s gaze darted into and then away from the boy’s eyes, as if she feared being mesmerized by him. He shrugged, started to turn and walk away, when she shrieked, “I got Mister Dark in there! Yes sir! That’s what I got!”

The boys in the Mercedes chortled. The boy in the store finally came out, but he wasn’t carrying a Slurpee. He had a six-pack of Budweiser. The boy near the crazy lady looked back at his friends, rolled his eyes, then said, “Who’s Mister Dark?”

“The prince of earwigs!” the crazy lady blurted, then clutched her chest in a spasm of wracking coughs.

“Earwigs, huh?” the kid commented. The crazy lady spat and nodded vigorously. “In there. In the box.”

“C’mon! Let’s roll!” the boy behind the wheel of the Mercedes shouted. “We got beer!”

Faye watched the string of headlights hurtling down the freeway. She’d taken the San Diego Freeway south, through Signal Hill and past Los Alamitos, and then she had cut east through Garden Grove to the Santa Ana Freeway, where she was supposed to turn south again. Right. Just bear to the right. Half an hour later, with the traffic growing heavier and carrying her along faster and faster, she discovered she was driving north, back into Los Angeles.

So she veered into an exit and stopped at the first gas station she came to, a dark, dirty place that was staffed by a lone Hispanic man.

“Do you have any maps?” she asked him, and he gave her a look of pure malevolence, an expression that chilled her blood to slush, and hooked a thumb at the office.

A map vending machine. She paid $2 for an LA map, hurried back to the Alero and locked the doors. The man watched her from the gas pumps. His face was hidden in shadow, as was the surrounding city as the sun slipped below a bank of clouds and smoke. She tried to study the map, and eventually guessed which way she had to go. As she drove away, she saw the man’s hobgoblin silhouette at the pumps, his head turning to follow her as she crossed the street and fled back into the torrent of cars.

“ – how’d you get … Mister Dark,” the boy snickered, “locked up inside a cardboard box?”

“I charmed the bastard in there,” the crazy woman hissed. “You got to use a charm to catch Mister Dark! The best kind of a charm! Mister Dark likes to hide in closets and under beds. You know why?” she whispered.

“Surprise me,” the boy said.

“So he can scare you!” she screamed.

The boy took an uncertain step back. His friends laughed loud and hard. The boy said, “Well, maybe when I was 2 years old.”

Faye shook her head. She really needed to be going. The motel was 10 miles south of here, and tomorrow she faced a long day of apartment hunting, and work started next Monday. She tried to make herself put down the newspaper and clean up her mess and leave, but she felt drugged and cold and exhausted, as if her brief time in Los Angeles had drained her of vitality. The boy and the crazy lady and the boys in the Mercedes were arguing in a raucous babble. The BMW roared away from the gas pumps, its radio braying punk rock music. Nobody had ever gotten out. The Slurpee cup skittered across the asphalt into a lake of shadow trying to flood inside the building.

“I wanna see what’s inside,” the boy shouted.

“No! You’ll let him out!”

Faye leaned back against the headrest. This was a mistake. A helicopter clattered overhead, its searchlight spearing the ground like a UFO from a Steven Spielberg movie. She wondered who, or what, it was looking for.

“You smack me with that and I’ll bust your goddamned head open, you stupid bitch,” the boy threatened. The crazy lady raised the club to do just that and the boy lunged and snatched it from her grasp. He pitched it aside. It thonked against the dumpster.

The crazy lady threw her arms protectively over the box and cried, “No! No! You’ll let him out! The prince of earwigs! Mister Dark!”

“C’mon, Andy,” a boy yelled from the Mercedes.

I want to go home. Ice melted in the cup lying on the floorboards. It rattled like bones in a cigar box.

The boy wrenched the box from under the crazy lady. The shopping cart tipped over, dumping the box onto the parking lot. The flaps flew open, and shadows seemed to spill out – shadows, and something else.

A gust of wind blew through the car window, catching the newspaper like a sail, turning the pages. Faye looked down and read: 2nd toddler found bludgeoned to death. Across the street, a man stood in the shadows. She hadn’t seen him there before. A hitchhiker. He was holding a sign, and she could barely read it. It said: Anywhere.

The boy began to laugh. “You crazy old bitch.”

“No!” the crazy lady moaned. “You’ve let him out! You’ve set him loose! He’s in the city! He’s everywhere! Can’t you see him? He’s everywhere – “

Faye looked up at the dashboard. Something was leaking from the turnover, something dark and viscous that smelled vaguely of chemicals. It left a slimy trail down the dashboard, around the air-conditioning vent, and to the carpet. Her gaze traveled from the carpet, to the windshield, her depth of focus centering on the hitchhiker. He seemed to be staring at her, the way everybody in L.A. had stared at her since she’d arrived: a thoughtless look that somehow seemed filled with malevolent intent.

The boy nudged whatever had fallen out of the box with the toe of his shoe. A doll-like hand flipped over. His expression congealed into bafflement, then intense scrutiny, and he yelled, “Oooh, gross! You guys! C’mere!” The crazy lady staggered off into the shadows, her voice fluttering bat-like out of the gloom, “I can see him! I can see him!”

The newspaper slid from Faye’s grasp and the pages rustled as they settled to the floorboards. A breaker of dark reared before her, and it seemed composed of millions of faces, uniform and anonymous in their multitudes, and they were lost for something that no drug, no secret kiss, no act of violence could give them. Anonymity. A car on the freeway. A girl at an airport kiosk. A man at a gas station. A hitchhiker. A crazy lady.

A woman sitting in a rental car outside a convenience store.

Faye stared in nerveless fascination at the lights above the gas pumps, and no insects circled there. Only dust blew through the cones of harsh brilliance, borne on a hot, dry wind, and overhead there were no stars in the sky, only helicopters and incoming jets, and she could hear nothing but the distant thunder of traffic, the city’s asthmatic respiration all around her, the shadows circling and closing, a faceless, bleak tide that lapped at the edges of her thoughts.

Mister Dark.

The hitchhiker was crossing the street, coming toward her. She tried to start the car, but the solenoid clicked uselessly. The boys had gathered in a reverential circle around whatever lay on the asphalt.

The hitchhiker was tapping on the driver’s side window, saying, “Lady? Lady, can I catch a lift?” Her blood had turned to frost. She fumbled for the electric door lock but he had the door open. The dome light didn’t come on. He climbed in and she felt herself sliding across the seat, furtively reaching for the door handle on the passenger side. The locks ratcheted into place.

He said, “You’re not from here. Let me drive; I know my way around this place. I can get you where you want to go. I’m sure it’s on my way.”

In her mind’s eye, Faye saw newspaper headlines about murders and gang shootings and rapes. The muscles around her throat were like pythons. She wanted to cry, but nothing would come out. She pictured herself riding onto the freeway with this man and never leaving, driving without end.

“Well? Where to?” he asked. He’d tossed his sign on the floorboards. Faye saw it from the corner of her eye. She’d been wrong. It read: Everywhere.

The hitchhiker shrugged and started the car. The engine turned over on the first try. He shifted it into gear and eased out of the parking lot.

And then the dark folded over them.

—

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .