7:14 p.m.

Baldwin slipped back in the seat aboard his team’s mobile command unit, a 40-foot vehicle stationed two blocks from the crime scene. His right leg was needles and nerves, his left, the beneficiary of a bouncing pencil.

He sat stone faced, staring at the bank of monitors flickering with more than a dozen local and national reporters updating viewers with wafers of information on the murders and the missing child.

For all the news coverage, there had been precious little news since that morning. The case was already cold, and well on its way to ice.

After darting his eyes around the cabin to make sure no one was watching, Baldwin slipped his hand into his jacket, retrieved a bottle of Percocets, popped three in his mouth, and peered inside the bottle.

Five left. Fuck.

Baldwin perked his ears toward the back of the truck, trying to untangle the snare of sounds, separating the various agents each on the phone with their sources, trying to mine any bit of information from a barren shaft. He’d already spent five hours on the phone blistering the ears of every local agency in a vain attempt to light a fire under their asses.

The murderer’s face shot across the network feeds on the monitors like some kind of America’s Most Wanted version of dominos. Baldwin squeezed his eyes and fished in his other pocket for his personal cell phone. Eyes still closed, his digits danced across the keys in a well rehearsed routine they’d performed several times a day for the past three years.

He held the phone at his ear, waited for the mechanized direction, then hit ‘one’ and then ‘one’ again and waited.

Same as always, the first note of her voice sent an ice slick sliding down his spine.

“Hi, honey, I’m running late. Carol and I stopped for coffee. Let me know if you want me to bring you anything. Oh, who am I kidding, you’re probably still at work. I love you. See you around eight — if you’re home. Bye.”

His heart shattered at the tiny laugh right before she added, “if you’re home,” just like it always did. Such a routine message, one of hundreds over the movement of their marriage which were routinely listened to, sometimes fast forwarded through, then deleted. As hard as it was for Baldwin to believe, this solitary message was the only survivor; the only recording he had of a voice that would never vibrate again.

He’d never thought to shoot video of her, or even the two of them together, despite having two video cameras and a drawer of unwrapped cassettes. This, and the countless copies he’d since made, were all that he had left to remind him of her beautiful voice.

With the bottomless sorrow that follows regret, Baldwin thought of the countless messages, vanished to vapor like the call of a bird who has flown to another sky. He would gladly swap his soul for a scattering of messages to aimlessly meander through again; something that went beyond the endless loop of her final dispatch.

He had seen her the night of those final words, but he had come home too late. She was already asleep. His mind burned at the memory of the sins he committed that night.  How he wish he could wash them away, undo them, and go home to spend just a few more hours with her.

Two days later, she would be dead.

His heavy eyelids still draped the pupils that would have been wet if the ducts hadn’t dried to desert so long before.

He turned his phone off, put it back in his pocket and was about to reach for the Percocets again when he heard someone coming — Agent Luis Alvarez.

“Cops in Westchester found the car,” Alvarez said.

Baldwin shot to attention, and instantly saw that Alvarez had the look of a man about to bear bad news.

“What?” Baldwin asked.

“Cop on the scene broke protocol,” he said. “He approached the car on his own.”

Baldwin’s eyes narrowed to two even slits, his voice a harsh whisper, “What the fuck?!”

________________

a half hour earlier…

John rose to the smell of soap and the bottled sound of television. On the bed across from him, Abigail sat, knees folded to her chest, hair wet, wearing one of the dead woman’s black long sleeve shirts.

Silent, she pointed to the television.

His image was plastered on the screen over the word SUSPECT. Beside it, a photograph of the girl with the word MISSING in bold letters, sheet white.

“They think you took me,” she said.

He could only stare.

The inevitable was now unfolding and his thoughts needed to sprint. His eyes followed the reporter, running his hand through his hair as he broadcast the make and model of their vehicle, with the license plate number as the cherry on the top. “… requesting that anyone with information call 1-800-93…”

The car.

John leaped from bed and ran to the drawn curtains before stopping himself.

“Is it still light out?” he asked the girl.

“Yeah,” she said, “I just looked.”

He glanced at the clock on the TV’s cable box  —  6:42 p.m. He wasn’t certain how he knew, but he figured he probably had another 20 minutes before nightfall.

“Can you drive?” he asked the girl.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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Almost four hours earlier…

The man without a name stared down at the burned bodies in disbelief. He no longer bore any of the scratches, scrapes or cuts that lacerated his body just minutes earlier, but he also felt impossibly alive; a new tempo seeming to beat in the blood beneath his skin.

Inside his mind, he was still feeling the staccato of shock from the murders he committed. He wondered again what the hell happened? And more importantly, how? He could not get his brain to embrace the arctic truth lying in ash before him.

In a vain desire to resolve his numbing questions and the enigma of his own identity, he slipped into a downstairs bathroom and finally came face to face with his disquieting reflection.

The face that stared back was young, with only two tiny wrinkles yet to flirt with the corners of his full mouth. His long dark hair and indigo eyes were no more recognizable than a stranger off the street. He leaned in close, examining his features as though they were harbored behind glass in a museum. The image blurred like a breaking wave, causing him to lean even closer before the hair on his neck rose to the sound of water running from a faucet he had not turned on.

What the?

Suddenly, the mirror image was gone, replaced by a mug he’d seen just minutes earlier – the angry face of the bald man.

He fell back against the wall, before realizing his reflection hadn’t changed. He wasn’t looking through his own eyes; he was peering through the eyes of the dead man, images caught in a previously deceased moment when the man had been shaving his head.

A single beat from the false reflection’s appearance and it was gone, replaced with the wide eyed stare coming from the hollow eyes of the amnesiac.

Without warning, the world disappeared again, and the man found himself staring into the approaching fist of the bald man. A split second shattered along with the impact and the amnesiac felt like a dull echo of a faraway sound. The bald man landed another blow and he felt it, like a phantom pain in an absent limb. The amnesiac screamed in a voice that was not his own, but that of the woman who had suffered the beating he was now experiencing.

Reality returned and the amnesiac fell to the ground, shaking, gripped by vertigo. Then the ride kicked into motion again.

A million memories seemed to tear through his skull in a sudden chaotic burst of flashing images and cacophony of sound. It was too much; the man’s head felt as if it were expanding rapidly, unable to contain all these alien thoughts. He reached up as if squeezing tightly enough would be enough to keep his skull intact.

More images swam through his mind in a dizzying current in which he was cast adrift. Understanding drowned him with the sick realization that he was somehow infected with the memories of the people he’d killed.

Voices grew louder — snippets of conversation, sounds of music, stolen thoughts, growing louder and faster; both cold and sharp like the blade of a dagger, digging into some deep part of his brain like a worm turning towards the center of an apple. Should that worm burrow to the core, the man shuddered with certainty, that it would plunge him deep into a madness from which he would never ascend.

Whatever traces left of his life before waking in the tomb were now drowning in chaos as he struggled to find some tether back to reality.

The whirling world flickered in and out of existence, one second displaying the reality before him and the next, the unnerving world behind the eyes of the dead.

He couldn’t fight anymore.

He let go and slipped into the darkness.

_____________

His bedroom was impossibly dark. Even the moon hanging fat in his window held no reign here. Downstairs, the boy’s father raged. But it wasn’t his father that held his attention or commanded his fear. It was the visitor in his room.

The shadow that was not a shadow, but not quite a man.

The boy thought he might be dreaming. He rubbed his eyes and opened them again, attempting to discern the shape, or rather shapes, moving in the darkness of his room.

“Hello?” the boy asked.

“Hello,” a voice whispered back. “I’m sorry it took so long.”

_____________

The amnesiac woke to the sound of pounding.

His eyes shot open as he leaped to his feet in a single fluid motion, fists clenched tightly at his sides, palpable waves of electric currents arcing around them. He was ready for whatever was coming.

But nothing came.

He looked around. It was still dark outside. He quickly ran to the blinds and closed them to prevent the entry of unwelcome eyes. He thought of whoever had buried him in the woods and that perhaps they were outside, waiting to finish the job.

He listened. The pounding returned, a soft tempo drifting from upstairs.

Another memory flashed — closet door — unlike the barrage of visions that nearly drove him mad, this one flared and faded quickly. Just long enough to send him up the stairs, hurried but uncertain of the door’s significance.

As he hit the landing, the pounding grew louder.

“Hello?” the amnesiac’s uncertain voice wavered through the still.

“Help, help!” came the shrill scream of a terrified child.

The amnesiac raced into the master bedroom and saw the closet door. The pounding continued louder. He threw open the closet door and flicked on a light. Boxes and clothes, but no child.

“There’s a lock, open it,” the child cried out, pounding at where the lock was.

He tossed boxes aside and saw a lock with a key in it, turned it, threw it to the ground and then pressed against the wall which was a door.

And then he saw her. A girl no older than 12, dark hair hanging over her large wet, dark eyes, her mouth wrenched open in an agonized wail mixed with relief.

“Abigail” a memory whispered just as the girl reached out to hug him.

A spark shot from her skin to his, and suddenly, a barrage of images he would never be able to unsee, pierced his mind; the horror of what the bald man had done to her. The memories flickered away and were replaced by reality as he saw their arms locked, her body convulsing and pupils rolling back into her skull..

It was starting.

This murderous energy was going to take her as it had done two others already.

A terrified scream fled his throat as he pulled back with every ounce of his strength to break the connection. They both stumbled backwards.

She retreated into her dungeon like a wounded animal, shaking, as he put distance between them.

She wasn’t dying.

“Don’t …touch me,” he gasped, fear choking his voice. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

She stared at him and then brushed her arms where they had briefly touched. She looked as if to ask what had he done, but instead said something else.

“Did you kill them?”

“Yes,” he said, about to explain he hadn’t done so on purpose, when she interrupted.

“Good,” she said.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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(Serial and Milk: Available Darkness is a serialized horror story co-written by David Wright and Sean Platt. A new chapter appears here each Friday. If you missed previous chapters, you can read them here.)

Baldwin stared at the image frozen on the screen.

He’d been pursuing the killer for an eternity already. His mind’s eye had worked up hundreds of images of what the man would look like, but none resembled the picture fixed upon the screen. This man was much younger than the profile the agents had been working from. The killer seemed to be in his mid to late twenties. His hair was long, hanging in his face. Shirtless, and bloody, he looked like a college kid who’d been on the losing end of a bar brawl.

While Baldwin had long ago learned that serial murderers came in every size, shape, age color and sex, he had an uncanny ability to size people up within seconds. Most of the criminals he tracked down had ‘a look’. This man did not, despite the rage etched into his face as he swung a chair at the bald man.

This man didn’t appear capable of what had been done to these, or any of the other bodies.

Baldwin wasn’t sure why the dead man had his house wired with security cameras in nearly every room and outside — paranoia or suspicions his girlfriend was fucking around.

“Play it,” Baldwin instructed his agents.

“There’s nothing after this,” Roberts said. The cameras all went to shit at once.”

It happened just as the killer and the bald man began to wrestle. The screen flickered with quick images and then went to snow.

“Signal jammer?” Roberts asked.

“Not unless he’s working with someone we’re not seeing,” Baldwin responded, “Did you check the connections on the cameras?”

Roberts nodded and clicked a button to show that all the screens were working now.

“The security cameras were off when we got here, like someone killed the power,” Roberts said, “even though there’s a backup supply.”

Baldwin stared at nothing, tumbling the known facts in his head, trying to pull sense from insanity. Usually, his analytical mind functioned with the pinpoint precision of a continuous engine, always churning with instant responses. Seeing this man, the man who killed his wife, was clouding the process.

He bit hard on his inner cheek. The copper taste of blood flooded his gums.

He told his agents to send stills of the video to headquarters to cross-check the system for matches. They had already issued regional Be On the Look Out’s for the victim’s presumably stolen vehicle.

If they couldn‘t find a name to match the face, they would proceed to the next step, releasing info to the media to see if anybody could provide an identity or location of their suspect.

Baldwin loathed releasing the details of this case to the press. He’d prefer to keep things quiet to make his job as simple as possible. It was harder to kill a criminal under the tent of a media circus.

Harder, not impossible. Will always lent a way.

Baldwin’s radio crackled through the silence. “Boss, you need to see this. In the master bedroom upstairs.”

Baldwin ascended the steps two at a time. He entered the room and felt an all too familiar sinking in his gut as he saw hundreds of DVD’s and photographs poured onto the bed and two agents watching something on their laptop.

Baldwin knew what was on the video before his eyes ever hit the screen.

A young dark haired girl no more than 11, underneath a naked bald man — the one from downstairs. The camera was zoomed in on the girl’s glazed dark eyes — this was not the first time she’d been raped. She simply stared into the camera, which was being held by someone, likely the girlfriend, judging from what the lens focused on. The camera woman was likely a victim at one point, too, Baldwin guessed.

The numbness in the child’s expression as the bald man raped her, stabbed Baldwin in the guts. Whoever the girl was, that person had died long ago, leaving a shell not unlike that of those downstairs.

He averted his gaze, turning it to the bed, forgetting the pile of DVD’s and photos. Baldwin spotted a few other children in the photos, though none with the bald man. They were likely gathered from newsgroups or traded with other pedophiles. The mind boggled at how many children’s slow deaths were chronicled in the mound of evidence.

Agent Ramirez handed Baldwin a photograph of the girl from the video, the image no less shocking.

“Found that in his printer tray and secured an emergency search warrant,” Ramirez explained. “Then we found all this in the closet.”

If the rapist weren’t already a roasted slab of pork, Baldwin would surely have run downstairs and put the gun to the man’s head and pulled the trigger. Twice.

“Did you see that?” Ramirez asked, pointing to something on the screen.

Ramirez looked around the room and back at the screen. “The closet in the video… it’s this closet! He shot the video right here.”

Baldwin looked at the screen. Sure enough, this was the room in the video. But who was the victim? The neighbors said the couple lived alone and the other rooms in the home served as storage, showing no sign of any children living with them. Perhaps it was a niece, a neighbor girl, or… then something in the video caught his eyes.

“Rewind it,” Baldwin said as he pointed quickly at the corner of the screen, “okay, stop. Pause it there!”

Ramirez, puzzled, looked at the screen, “what are you looking at?”

It was hard to look beyond the evil in the foreground, but just beyond the monster, inside the closet, Baldwin saw something that made his heart leap in his chest and then into his throat.

He raced to the closet.

Light already on.

Threw clothes and half empty boxes aside. Hands furiously searching along the back wall. Only it wasn’t a wall.

But rather a hidden door.

On the floor, just behind a men’s size 12 Nike, an open padlock, the key sticking out like an arrow in a bulls-eye. Baldwin’s eyes locked on the door as if he could will his eyes to see through it.

He drew his gun and glanced back at his agents to make sure they were doing the same — every one of them was.

Baldwin pressed against the door. It clicked softly and slowly opened inward, revealing a 10 by 10 room, or rather a holding cell, painted in garish pink with a mattress on the floor. Soiled sheets with some children’s show characters on it. Stuffed animals lay in a row along a blue pillow. Stagnant air reeking of waste steeped in a bowl in the corner of the room.

“Jesus” someone said behind Baldwin.

The room was empty.

“We’ve got a possible missing child,” Baldwin spoke into his radio, “maybe kidnapped by our murder suspect. We’re sending a photo. Add this to the BOLO‘s.”

He instructed his agents to find out how many other girls were on the discs to see if they could verify if the dark haired girl was indeed the room’s prisoner.

Baldwin glanced back at the monster on the computer screen and prayed the girl wasn’t now in the hands of something even worse.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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Every week, I grabbed some cookies and milk and curled up in my bed with the lights turned out, waiting for the next exciting installments. This show in a word, rocked my striped tube socks!

The show didn’t even last a season, as I recall, and I was pretty sad when it ended without resolving the cliffhangers!

But it had a lasting impact on me. I LOVED the feeling of building suspense and leaving people hanging and wanting more. In high school, I started writing short stories which I passed to a few classmates. I’m sure the stories were pretty bad, but they were good enough to get the desired reaction. People who normally didn’t talk to me were suddenly coming around and asking for the next installment of whatever story I was writing at the time. It was an amazing feeling!

Now that I have a slightly wider audience, and I’m a more capable writer, I want to recreate the magic which left me spellbound as a child.

I’d been sitting on this story, Available Darkness, for a long time when I met Sean Platt. I love his writing style. I decided to re-write a few chapters of my long stagnant story and send them his way to see what he could do with them. He turned my stale prose into magic. We began passing the text back and forth, each of us adding some ingredients to create what we have here.

This experiment in presenting serialized fiction on the web embraces both the spirit of collaboration that makes the Collective Inkwell and the spirit of creativity-driven community we are fostering here.

We hope you enjoy this story as it unfolds over the course of the next several Fridays. Please leave feedback, help spread the word on your blog and Twitter, etc…  Go grab some cookies and milk and get enjoy the first installment of Serial and Milk : Available Darkness.

Prologue

The memory rose like a bubble in the darkness.

He was a child, not yet in school, when he first learned of monsters.

He was lying in bed, pillow clutched over his head, trying to drown out the muffled sounds of his parents fighting downstairs. His father was drunk. Again. The threat of violence was palpable in the air, alive like electric currents, causing his hairs to stand on end.

It wouldn’t be long now before the sounds of screaming were replaced by cries and the sickening sound of flesh pounding flesh. Perhaps his father’s blood lust would be sated. Or, perhaps the boy’s door would burst open and the battle continued on the second floor.

He prayed in vain to a God he long ago stopped believing in. A child should not have to lose faith so early in life.

Please, stop him.

Suddenly the house was quiet. That meant one of two things. Either his prayer was answered or, more likely, the monster was coming for him.

The boy pulled the pillow from his head and strained to hear the sounds of footfalls on stairs. He closed his eyes tightly and braced for what was to come. He would pretend to sleep. Sometimes it even worked.

He heard the door creak behind him and tried to camouflage his shortness of breath. Real sleepers breathe deep and heavily. He wouldn’t fool the monster with his rapid breathing. He concentrated and made an effort to slow his breath as best he could.

Light washed the wall in front of him and he heard the door close softly. He waited to hear retreating footsteps, but heard nothing. He was certain the monster was in the room with him. Waiting. He could feel his father’s hateful eyes on him.

He wasn’t sure how long he feigned sleep, but it seemed to be forever. Suddenly, he heard his father’s voice downstairs, followed by his mother’s crying out.

Surprised, the boy figured he must have fallen asleep and missed his father leaving the room. Yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t alone. He slowly turned over, pretending to still be asleep. He waited a moment and then risked opening his eyes.

And then he saw the shadow in the corner of his room. A shadow that was not a shadow, but not quite a man.

The boy screamed.

The bubble rose and broke as it crashed into the surface…

Chapter One

The man woke amidst the black, breath barely budging from the shallow prison of his angry lungs.  He tried to inhale but only doubled back into a rasping, retching pile of sod and vomit.  He attempted to lift his leaden head, but could raise it barely an inch. Gravity seemed to crush him from all sides; his arms, he realized with a horrifying dread, were fixed against his sides as though shackled.

His mind scrambled to pull sense from his surroundings.  A horribly long minute later, he realized he was captive in a box.  Buried alive and left to rot beneath the crumbling earth.

I’m not dead, his mind started to scream.

His mouth would only make sounds that refused to render into words.  Nothing but a raspy gasp and a rolling tumble of soil and spit fell from his lips.

Panic set deep and his whispering breath climbed further toward a pant, echoing against the narrow walls of his tomb, keeping time with his furiously pounding heart.

What happened? Why am I buried?

His voice found its way through the suffocation and he heard his own whimpering cries of  “no,no,no” as he tried to shake life into his limbs. The voice was not his own, but that of a frightened child. No, a frightened animal.

His body bristled from a billion pins and needles, impeding his thought and dulling his motion.  With a strength he didn’t know he had, behind a panic that could only be borne beneath the bilious earth, he shoved his forearms madly against the cap of the casket. With a reluctant snap, the nail wormed its way through the wood and the lid of his prison shifted a quarter of an inch.

He clawed, scraped, and pushed at the darkness above him with blunt, awkward blows, blotting the bulkhead with blood he could not see but could smell. He desperately fought his way upwards, using first his arms and then his knees, finally his head; anything to give him leverage. And then his arms shot forward, no longer meeting resistance as the lid lifted and fell to the earth beside him with a thick, muffled thud.

The moon mocked his confusion. He collapsed into the cold dirt, sucking crisp air into his stale lungs in bottomless mouthfuls, then exhaling the old wind in hot gusts of steam which evaporated into the frigid air of midnight.

His body tensed from the nearby sound of movement and he pulled himself upright to peer through the darkness.

He was in the midst of thick woods.  Tree branches pierced the gloaming like ink stained daggers, barely illuminated by the pale silver moon. Shivering, he finally registered his bloodied bare arms and chest. All he wore were jeans, blood soaked jeans.

He would have screamed for help, but something – he wasn’t quite sure what – stopped him cold.

He pulled himself from the casket, his numb foot sinking into the cold soil.  Beside him lay a hole, five feet deep and wide enough to swallow both he and the casket whole. A shovel bulged from a mound of dirt; an invitation for whoever had started digging to come back and finish the job.

Jesus Christ, he thought, I was drugged, kidnapped, and Lord knows what else.

Another sound of movement. A branch breaking.

He realized with a horrible certainty that whatever psycho had dropped him in the dirt, was not yet gone. Not yet done.

He glanced again at the shovel and swallowed.

He forced his body into an awkward sprint, legs wobbly as he stumbled blindly into the night.

Just run.

He prayed not to run into whatever monster brought him here to die.

to be continued…

Read the rest of the chapters as they are posted each Friday. Links to each chapter can be found here.

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