Darkness Falling Read online

  Praise for PETER CROWTHER

  "Crowther's twisted rapture is a fast-paced, character driven, funny, gruesome apocalypse."

  – Stephen Baxter

  "I was reminded of the best of Stephen King. It's the smartest and most compelling end-of-the-world alien zombie story I have ever read."

  – Adam Roberts

  "This book is told with a sure hand and careful attention to detail; it's frightening where it should be, sensitive where it should be, and enthralling throughout."

  – Mike Resnick

  "Peter Crowther is crafting the first great post-apocalyptic saga of the new century, one that may dwarf even such a benchmark work as The Stand."

  – Lucius Shepard

  "Anything that has Pete Crowther's fingerprints on it is evidence of quality. Snap it up."

  – Joe R. Lansdale

  "As intensely menacing and gruesome as any George Romero film. A virtuoso 'tour de force' by Pete Crowther."

  – Ramsey Campbell

  "His writing is master storytelling at its finest — gripping, chilling and beautifully told."

  – Sarah Pinborough

  ALSO BY PETER CROWTHER

  Escardy Gap (with James Lovegrove)

  Fugue on a G-String

  Gandalph Cohen and the Land at the End

  of the Working Day

  The Hand that Feeds

  After Happily Ever

  Collections

  The Longest Single Note and Other Strange Compositions

  Lonesome Roads

  Cold Comforts

  Songs of Leaving

  The Spaces Between the Lines

  The Land at the End of the Working Day

  PETER CROWTHER

  Darkness Falling

  Forever Twilight, Volume 1

  For my beautiful granddaughters Orla Plum, Edie Serene and Elsie Blue – may the four of us sit down one evening not too far away, to enjoy the intoxicating frisson of unease that comes with the telling of a spooky story at bedtime.

  The night has a thousand eyes,

  And the day but one.

  - F. W. Bourdillon, Among the Flowers

  We like to think we live in daylight,

  but half the world is always dark;

  and fantasy, like poetry,

  speaks the language of the night.

  - Ursula K. Le Guin

  Darkness, darkness

  Be my pillow

  Take my head and let me sleep…

  In the coolness of your shadow,

  In the silence of your deep.

  - The Youngbloods, Darkness Darkness

  PROLOGUE

  When they were barely minutes out of Denver, and not many more to go before a bright light was to change their lives forever, Martha Mortenson said to her husband, Ronnie, "You want to borrow my glasses?" saying it in that oh-so-smart voice she used when she was wanting to make a point.

  Martha was always wanting to make a point these days. It wasn't anything personal – though that was kind of a dumb thing to say about the way you spoke to your husband, and Martha would have been the first to agree with that: after all, conversation between a couple should be personal – but it was just the way things were now, in the fourteenth year of their marriage. The fourteenth year of their bloodless war.

  The marriage wasn't going to last a whole lot longer, though neither of them knew it at that time.

  Ronnie felt his cheeks redden as he turned around to face his wife. "Sorry, miles away," he said lamely. He continued swallowing in an attempt to clear the blocked noise in his ears. It was like he was overhearing conversations from another room, carried along a corridor to where he was sitting. Where he was sitting was in Row S, right hand side of the plane, Seat 5: Martha was in 6, next to the window, and Seat 4, next to the aisle, was empty. Ronnie thought that maybe he should have occupied the aisle seat and left the middle one empty. But it was too late now.

  Martha adjusted the glasses perched on the end of her nose, gave one final glance at the girl in the aisle struggling with her bag in the locker above where she was sitting and snorted without humor as she returned her attention to her newspaper. "Yeah, right. I'd say it was more like just a few feet."

  "What?"

  "You said 'miles'," Martha said, nodding at the backside of the girl in the aisle. "More like a few feet."

  He looked across at her.

  The lead article in Martha's newspaper featured a photo of a young woman with an open smile, one of those pictures taken in photo booths for passport purposes.

  The headline read:

  MUMMY-MAN'S FOURTH VICTIM FOUND IN WOODLAND

  Then, in smaller-sized type beneath it:

  DENVER POLICE NO CLOSER TO FINDING KILLER'S IDENTITY

  Mummy-man! Ronnie made a noise with his mouth. These serial killer names were getting more and more outlandish. This latest one was so-called because his preferred method of dispatch, apparently, was to bind his victims from head to toe in gauze bandage until all incoming oxygen was blocked off. Then, presumably – nobody actually knew for sure because all they did was discover the bodies, and the bodies weren't saying anything – presumably he sat and watched them die. Or why else would he go to all those lengths? At least there was no evidence of sexual assault, so not all bad news. Hey, Mrs Jones, we found your daughter, bound up in gauze, dead as last night's pizza wrapping… but at least she wasn't assaulted. So let's crack open a bottle of Moët and raise a toast.

  Ronnie felt his seat shudder. He had already suffered a few pulls and judders from the guy immediately behind him, the guy using Ronnie's seat back as a means for adjusting his vast bulk, a process which seemed to involve the guy jamming his head into the gap between Ronnie's and Martha's seats and then breathing stale garlic all over them. Another reason, maybe, for changing seats. Hadn't these people heard about the weight crisis?

  "You OK back there?" Ronnie said, glaring between the seats.

  The big man in the seat immediately behind Ronnie shrugged, saying, "What?", hands held out, palms up. This was a man who had never heard of dieting, didn't know diddly about deep vein thrombosis and hadn't yet learned of the invention of toothpaste. He was jammed so tightly into his seat that they were going to need a crane to get him free. Ronnie suddenly dreaded when this guy was going to need to go for a pee.

  Shaking his head, Ronnie decided not to respond but instead turned his attention to Martha. "What the hell's that supposed to mean?" he said.

  Ronnie was feeling a little antsy. He wasn't a good flier at the best of times, and ten after five in the goddam morning on a flight that was already more than seven hours behind schedule – with Denver airport probably still visible behind them as they climbed to a cruising altitude – and now Martha was playing her famous bitch-of-the-fucking-year role. Factor in that they wouldn't be back at home in Atlanta until mid-morning, long after the cock-crow – "sparrow-fart," as his father used to say – arrival they had envisaged, and he just wasn't in the mood for pissy remarks.

  "Dad was right," was all Martha would say.

  Ronnie returned the snort with interest. "Hold the goddam front page," he said with a sneer. "Your father was never right. Your father has made a life's work out of never being right." He rustled the pages of his Rolling Stone for emphasis and was immediately annoyed to see the cover had broken from the center staples. "One whacked-out hair-brained fuck-up scheme after another and what's he got to show for it?"

  "A happy marriage."

  "Oh, yeah, right. Second time around, though. Anyone should be able to get it right once they've had a little practice." He paused for a moment and picked up the ball he'd unknowingly tossed to himself. "Hell, I reckon even I would be happy second time out."

 
; "Just say the word, Ronnie," Martha said without looking up, sounding for all the world like a female Ralph Kramden. "Just say the damn word and you can give it a go." She nodded again at the girl in the aisle. "Think she's maybe a little old for you, though. She must be pushing twenty-three if she's a day."

  It had been quite a while since Ronnie had been on the sunny side of twenty-three. Or even thirty-three. Now, the specter of forty – the Big Four Oh – straddled the horizon like a storm cloud, and the once-thick (if not actually bushy) head of hair had thinned out, exposing areas of pale scalp around the crown and a receding hairline that Ronnie's mom said made him look like Robert Taylor. Ronnie hadn't known who Robert Taylor was until Allie Mortenson dug out an old copy of Movieworld and pointed out a photo of the actor to her son. "It's called a 'widow's peak'," Allie had said, before going on to explain that a widow's peak actually referred to the same V-shaped hair-point on the forehead of a woman. "Means they'll outlive their husband." Ronnie had just nodded and filed it away with other trivia such as the origin of the term "take a rain check", while thinking – somewhat guiltily – how nice it would be to outlive Martha.

  He looked up from an article on Don DeLillo and stared at the side of his wife's head. Ronnie had started to read DeLillo's Underworld, and loved the long prologue about the baseball and Sinatra sitting in the bleachers and everything, but after that he couldn't figure out what the hell was going on and he'd just up and left it one day, turning instead to re-reading Avery Corman's The Old Neighborhood, which he did every few years, wrapping himself in the novel like it was the old pair of corduroy pants he'd had at Cornell and which Martha had seen fit to throw out with the trash one spring-clean-up.

  In the trash, along with their entire relationship.

  Maybe that had been the beginning of the end right there.

  There had been a time when things had been great for Ronnie and Martha, blowing along like the warm breeze that typifies summer and a worry-free relationship. But then things had started to sour a little, just like, Ronnie supposed, they soured in the relationship between Steven and Beverly Robbins in Corman's novel. It didn't happen fast, like one day you wake up and everything has changed; it happened slow and secretively, building up like silt along the banks of a river. And pretty soon, you can't take a step without sinking up to your waist.

  That was the way it was for Ronnie and Martha, childhood sweethearts but adult combatants. Ronnie wished he could have understood DeLillo's book about the baseball because he figured there was a lot of stuff in there that could be pertinent. He liked the novel's slightly mystical and even mythical tone but that was something special where baseball was concerned. And Ronnie knew all about that. After all, he had read Bernard Malamud's The Natural, Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer, Philip Roth's The Great American Novel and all of Bill Kinsella's baseball yarns, particularly Shoeless Joe, Ronnie's favorite – he'd loved the movie starring Costner and had actually wept in the theater, which Martha just hadn't been able to understand.

  "You know," Ronnie had said to Martha as they'd made their way back to Ronnie's rusting Mustang (he'd loved that car), "I sometimes think you have no soul." And Martha had laughed and grabbed a hold of his crotch, squeezing gently, saying in a voice that was softer and more sultry than it seemed it had been ever since, "Yeah, but I have a place for this fella. But first you got to get your fingers wet."

  Ronnie winced, partly at the memory of the grossness of what she had said and partly – maybe the bigger part, if truth be told – at the fact that it had turned him on so. Turned him on sufficiently that he had nearly piled the Mustang into a ditch outside of Morganstown Woods.

  Maybe that was the first nail hammered into the coffin right there. There was no real romance involved in their relationship – just sex. Sure, there had been good times, but it had gotten so Ronnie could actually count them, each of them specifically, and when he would run out, it was always the same times that he'd identified.

  There had to be a first nail and that was surely it, now that Ronnie stopped to think about it… here at ten thousand feet and still climbing, leaving Denver airport some five hours late, heading home to Atlanta after spending a grueling weekend with Martha's father, Frank, and her stepmom, Lucinda. It had been almost sixty hours of pure torture for Ronnie. Hours of sage nods from Frank, hands in pants pocket, head lifted, chin thrust out as he chewed a non-existent piece of cud and considered every damn thing that was mentioned as though it was a momentous decision. And similar hours of the ever-attentive Lucinda, smelling of lavender, peppermints and cigarette smoke, all swirling, flouncy cotton dresses like the ones Mary Tyler Moore wore in the re-runs of the old Dick Van Dyke Show.

  Yes, maybe they should get divorced, pack it all in, Ronnie thought, watching Martha watch his face, her eyes flitting from side to side like insects, looking a little nervous now, nervous because she couldn't quite figure out what the hell Ronnie was thinking about. He liked that, took a certain amount of pleasure out of seeing her mentally wrong-footed.

  The in-flight PA system beeped and the seatbelt sign flashed off. Ronnie suddenly realized that the girl in the aisle had been standing up messing with the locker while it had still been illuminated. He wondered if that girl might have been more attentive to him… might have shown some warmth. But maybe all was not lost – Martha had just given him an exit line. But the thing was, did she mean it?

  "Are you serious?" Ronnie asked her, keeping his voice soft and thinking of the guy in The Old Neighborhood who left the ad agency he'd built from scratch and went back to the streets where he'd grown up in Brooklyn, working as a soda jerk and playing handball with the kids around the block, learning just what was important in life and leaving behind all the shit that his world had gotten clogged up with. Like all the shit that Martha dished out day in and day out, like her fucking life depended on it. But when she turned to him, Ronnie momentarily felt like a heel, like he'd wounded her deep down inside, a deep cut that nobody would ever be able to see but which would take years to heal over.

  She shook her head gently, squinting at him, turning her mouth up in that oh-so-practiced sneer. Behind her head he could see the clouds still roiling outside the window. "What is it with you, Ronnie?" she said, venom in the whisper.

  He turned away, either unable or reluctant to say anything more, knowing that a turning point had appeared, a fork in the road that could decide his direction – and Martha's direction – for the rest of their lives. He stared at the seat-back just a few inches away from him, hoping to see some kind of sign appear – some little nugget of homespun guidance.

  When had all the arguing started?

  He glanced down at his Rolling Stone and wondered whether all relationships soured after a time. What was it they said about monogamy? A triumph of civilization over instinct? Something like that. In his mind, he pictured Martha on her back, in the old days, staring up at him – "I do so love you, Ron," she used to say to him, repeating it over and over as he worked away inside of her, each word followed by a small gassy exhalation as he withdrew and thrust, withdrew and thrust.

  He looked up and rested his head back on the seat. Maybe she had done. Then. And maybe he had loved her, too. Then. What had happened since that time – twenty-some years – was called life.

  The girl in the aisle was still struggling with the locker. As she stretched up, she exposed a gap of flesh between the bottom of her sweater and the top of her jeans, and just above the jeans was a telltale strap of the top of a thong. He stared first at the thong and then at the cheeks of the girl's bottom, watching it wobble deliciously as she strained at the bag.

  Martha leaned across Ronnie's knee, creasing the Rolling Stone still further, and shouted to the girl – "Miss?" – and flipped her on the ass with her rolled-up newspaper.

  The girl turned around frowning, then saw Ronnie watching her and broke into a tight smile. The girl had a slight overbite and when she smiled it caused little dimples at the sides of her mouth
.

  "Miss? I'm here? Hell-oo?"

  Her smile fading, the girl shifted her attention to Martha just as the stewardesses inched forward with their trolley.

  "Martha, just leave it," Ronnie said.

  The girl looked puzzled. "Yes?"

  "Martha, what are you doin–"

  "I wonder if you could do my husband a favor while you're doing that?" Without waiting for a response, Martha continued, "Could you remove your pants completely so that he can get a really good look at your ass? I'm sure he'd be grateful. He's doing his best to study it, but, well, you know how it is. His eyesight's not what it once was." She straightened out her newspaper and, looking over the headlines again, added, "Mind you, there's a lot about him that isn't what it once was."