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  Ben stood and limped forward, unable to take his eyes from her face. “Marissa,” he said again.

  “Hello, Ben.” She smiled and turned her shoulder toward him playfully. “Did you miss me?”

  “More than anything.”

  He stopped twenty feet from the treeline.

  “But you’re not really you,” he said.

  “Nonsense. Just look at me.” She twirled around once, her hair lifting out and bobbing against her face when she stopped and looked at him again. “I’m as real as can be. I missed you, Benjamin. We never got to say goodbye. It was so cold in that water, Ben, so cold without you. I remember you on the ice, looking down at me. You were screaming. The ice was covered in blood because you almost scratched off your own fingernails. I could hear your fists pounding from above, pounding as I sank lower…”

  Ben shook his head and took a step back. Marissa circled around him, smiling, until the forest was at his back. She took a step closer and he took a step away, toward the woods.

  “I don’t blame you,” she said. Her arm reached out for him, the palm of her hand held upward as if she wanted him to pull her closer. “It wasn’t your fault. Accidents hap—”

  “Don’t you say it.”

  “Benjamin, accidents happen.”

  He shook his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, she was standing right in front of him, no more than a foot away. She reached up and touched his face. He felt the warmth of her skin against his own.

  He cried as he kissed her palm.

  “I want us to be a family again,” she said. “You, me, and Annabelle. Bring her back, Benjamin. Bring her back to me so I can be with my daughter. So we can all be together.”

  Something moved in the woods behind him.

  Ben moved his cheek against Marissa’s hand. It would have been so easy to stay with her; to keep his eyes closed and live in that moment as long as he possibly could. He thought of all the people that had already died and the countless others that would soon join the dead.

  “Goodbye, Marissa,” he said.

  He shoved her to the side and ran past her toward the church.

  The demon screamed from the woods and crashed out onto the field. Ben ran as fast as he could, dragging his injured leg behind him as he limped across the open ground.

  He looked back as the demon scrambled toward him. Its skin peeled up and sizzled loudly all over its body, smoking as if it were on fire. Each step it made onto the ground instantly burned the grass in a large circle near its flesh.

  Flames burst from the bottom of its limbs and licked up the demon’s skin to its torso.

  Ben tripped against the bottom step below the front door of the church. He landed on his injured leg and screamed as he pulled himself up the steps, arm over arm.

  The demon collapsed at the base of the stairs, writhing and screaming as fire consumed its entire body. Its flesh melted away from its bones as Ben crawled up the steps.

  He backed against the door of the church and sat there breathing heavily as the demon pulled into itself and burst outward again to try and extinguish the flames. Its limbs disappeared into its body and shot back out in different places. Its head imploded and reformed into the shape of a wolf, then a child, then a wolf again.

  It lurched up onto the bottom step, the wood under its bones instantly charring black. It reached out a clawed limb and plunged it down into Ben’s chest. He screamed as the burning bones pierced his ribcage. The demon’s other hand gripped his injured leg and melted into his thigh.

  It dragged Ben down off the top step and toward its burning body. The demon opened its mouth wide; burning teeth flashed at Ben as it pulled him closer and closer.

  Ben clawed at the steps with his one good hand, his fingernails scraping trails into the soft wood. He kicked at the demon with his free leg, cracking bones and scraping away loose flesh.

  With a dying howl—the screams of all of its victims—the flames went out and the demon collapsed against the steps. The exposed bones of its twisted skeleton hissed and cracked.

  Ben pulled the hand of the demon from his chest and pushed it away, then fell back onto the steps.

  Above, the sky showed the first signs of a new day. The crucifix atop the steeple of the church caught the morning light and reflected it down onto him.

  Ben closed his eyes, his breathing slowed, and he thought of Annabelle.

  EPILOGUE

  The roof of The Last Valley Church sagged inward and tugged at the corners of the building, pulling them down as if the church was made of wax and a giant candle had been held too close to the paneling. Splinters of thin wooden planks fanned up from the bent, broken walls.

  A tall crucifix rested against the front wall of the church. The dark wood was swollen and cracked from years of dampness. Two white patches of curling paint clung to the crucifix, but even those were streaked with green and black mildew.

  Annabelle Howard slipped off her left sandal and curled her toes into the wet grass of the wide clearing. The morning air was fresh with the smell of the woods surrounding the church; dirt and trees and flowers. Insects buzzed and birds sang to each other in the trees.

  The short grass at her feet had once been a dirt driveway that led from the church and out of the valley to the city of Falling Rock. The rest of the grass in the clearing around the sagging building grew tall and wild. An old vine-covered shed rested back in the trees to one side, its folded aluminum walls red with rust.

  Annabelle turned and smiled at the man sitting in the car behind her at the point where the forest met the clearing. A light gust of wind pushed a long strand of blonde hair over her face and she tucked it back behind her ear. The man in the car smiled back and his eyes said that he was there if she needed him.

  She pulled the strap of her purse a little higher on her shoulder and looked at the church.

  Annabelle took off her other sandal and allowed the wet grass to curl up over the top of her foot as she lowered it onto the soft earth.

  She hadn’t returned to that place in more than twenty years. She had been so busy caring for her Aunt Heidi in her waning years and attending college that she had allowed herself to put off the visit to Falling Rock; to push the painful thought of truly saying goodbye to her father to the back of her mind.

  It was only after Heidi passed away that Annabelle felt she was ready to make the journey back to the haunted memories of her childhood.

  She vividly remembered standing before the front steps of the church as a little girl and looking up at the steeple several weeks after the traumatic events that had taken so many lives.

  Karen Raines was there holding Annabelle’s hand because Aunt Heidi was still in the hospital. Raines had to walk around on crutches but she still agreed to take Annabelle back to the church so she could try to say goodbye. Karen was two months pregnant at the time—she found out in the hospital after the nurses ran a series of blood tests when they briefly thought her foot might have to be amputated. She wouldn’t say who the father was until many years later, when she told Annabelle that it was a man from Falling Rock that hadn’t survived the attacks. By then Karen’s little boy was as old as Anna had been when she escaped from the monster. The boy had jet black hair like his mother, she said.

  Annabelle and Karen spoke on the phone at least once a year. Karen lived in northern Indiana. She was the sheriff of a small town called Riley and every time Annabelle spoke with her on the phone she seemed untroubled by the terrible events in Falling Rock—somehow Karen had learned to leave the past behind her and was able to let go of her nightmares.

  Annabelle was trying hard to find the strength to move on.

  She didn’t know how to say goodbye as a young girl, so she had come back with the man she loved to try again. His name was Nathaniel. They were engaged to be married although they hadn’t yet set a wedding date. Each of them was strong when the other needed to be weak. Annabelle had never felt more whole than when she was with him. They
wanted to start a new life together, but there was always the one thing from Annabelle’s past that stopped her from moving forward.

  She closed her eyes and couldn’t help but picture her father as he lay bleeding on the front steps of the church. Lightning flashed across the image and illuminated a monster clawing at her father’s legs as he tried to get away.

  Annabelle opened her eyes and wiped away a tear.

  She reached into her purse and pulled out a tattered old book. A thin leather string attached to the edge of the back cover looped around a small button on the front to keep the book sealed. Annabelle unwound the string and the crisp, wrinkled pages pushed the covers apart to a page she had looked at many times before.

  She couldn’t read the language in the book but the sketches and diagrams were often easy to interpret. As best she could tell, the pages she held before her depicted the monster that had killed almost everyone in Falling Rock.

  The sketch on the left page showed a beast climbing out of a black hole in the ground. It had two heads and each one breathed fire that consumed men, women, and children. The sketch on the right page showed the beast in a large city. Bodies were impaled on spikes rising from its back. It crushed buildings underfoot and stood triumphantly amidst the chaos. Hundreds of people ran screaming from its terror.

  Annabelle closed the book and set it back in her purse.

  She had taken it to scholars from many different fields of expertise in the hopes of learning more about the writings within, but none had admitted the possibility that the book was genuine.

  Nathaniel believed her, and she was glad to discover that was all she really needed.

  Annabelle walked to the steps at the front of the church and looked down at the black scars burned into the warped wood. She bent down and placed her palm on the top step, closed her eyes, and said, “Thank you, Dad.”

  She stood and picked up her sandals as she walked back to the car. She sat in the passenger’s seat and leaned over to kiss Nathaniel, then settled back as he turned the car around and began the long drive out of the valley.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  The church grew smaller in her side-view mirror. It disappeared around a bend in the road and took with it the heavy weight that she had been carrying ever since she was a little girl.

  She smiled. “I’m okay.”

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  This book and parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarities to actual persons, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

  HELLO DARKNESS Copyright © 2012 by Sam Best

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Epilogue

  Notes