Darkroom Read Free

dark? You’d think that there’d be
some
light, coming from the highway.’
    â€˜I’m almost at the door,’ Bobby told her. ‘I can feel the door frame. I can feel the light switch.’
    He clicked the light switch up and down, but nothing happened. The beach house remained totally black, without even a chink of light from the shuttered windows. Normally, the sky was filled with sodium light from the Pacific Coast Highway, but not tonight.
    â€˜Maybe the circuit-breaker’s gone.’
    â€˜But if there are no lights
anywhere
, it must be the power company.’
    Ker-chikk
. Now it was really close, only inches away from Bobby.
    â€˜I’m warning you!’ he yelled. ‘I have a shotgun here and I’m going to count to three and then I’m going to fire!’
    â€˜It’s no good shouting at it if it’s an insect,’ said Sara.
    â€˜It’s not an insect! I don’t know what the hell it is! It’s right here! It’s right in front of me!
    He waved his arms wildly from side to side but he couldn’t feel anything. ‘There’s nothing here! There’s nothing here! Oh
shit
, Sara, there’s nothing here!’
    â€˜Stop it!’ Sara screamed at him. ‘Stop it, you’re scaring me!’
    Bobby took two or three steps backwards and collided with the bed. He negotiated his way around the brass bed rails and climbed back on to it, reaching out for Sara’s hand. He was panting with terror.
    â€˜If there’s nothing there,’ said Sara, ‘there’s nothing for us to be scared of.’ She didn’t sound at all convinced.
    â€˜There’s something there, but it’s
nothing
.’
    â€˜What do you mean, it’s nothing?’
    â€˜I don’t know. But it’s there. I mean, we can
hear
it, right? Even if we can’t feel it.’
    They waited for over a minute. Normally, they would have expected their eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness, but even after all this time, they couldn’t see anything at all. It was almost like being buried alive.
    â€˜What the hell’s wrong with the power company?’ Bobby complained. ‘Why don’t they put the lights back on?’
    But then, very faintly, they saw a shimmering shape in the doorway. It shifted and rippled, as if they were viewing it through running water.
    â€˜What is that?’ Sara whispered. ‘It looks like a moth.’
    Bobby stared at the shape intently. It had two white blotches on either side, which could have been wings. But as it gradually brightened, he realized that they weren’t wings at all, but eye sockets. The shape was a human face, except that it looked like a photographic negative, with white hair and black skin and shadows in varying shades of white and gray.
    â€˜Oh my God,’ said Sara. ‘What is it? It’s not a ghost, is it?’
    â€˜OK, whoever you are!’ said Bobby in the most challenging tone he could manage. ‘I can see you now, OK? And you have to get the hell out of here, because this property belongs to Mr and Mrs John D. Tubbs and you don’t have any right to be here. So just go.’
    There was silence, but then there was a soft
ker-chikk
, and the face was suddenly much closer. Because it was negative, it was impossible to tell it if was young or old. But its white eyes were wide open and staring at them, and its black teeth were bared.
    Sara was gripping Bobby’s hand so tightly that her false fingernails were digging into him. ‘What is it?’ she gasped. ‘Oh God, make it go away!’
    But Bobby couldn’t speak. The face brought back all of the nightmares that used to wake him up when he was younger. It was the face of everything terrible that hid during the day, but came out of concealment as soon as it grew dark. The things that hid at the end of the alleyway, inside the rusty old water tank. The strange faces that looked at