Etched Deep & Other Dark Impressions Read online

  Etched Deep

  & Other Dark Impressions

  By David Niall Wilson

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2012 David Niall Wilson

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Background Images provided by: http://mysticmorning.deviantart.com/

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER TITLES BY DAVID NIALL WILSON FOR YOUR KINDLE

  NOVELS:

  Ancient Eyes

  Deep Blue

  Sins of the Flash

  The Orffyreus Wheel

  Darkness Falling

  The Mote in Andrea's Eye

  On the Third Day

  The Second Veil

  Maelstrom

  Stargate Atlantis–SGA-15–Brimstone (With Patricia Lee Macomber)

  The DeChance Chronicles

  Heart of a Dragon – Book I of the DeChance Chronicles

  Vintage Soul–Book II of the DeChance Chronicles

  My Soul to Keep–Book III of the DeChance Chronicles

  O.C.L.T. – An Original Series from Crossroad Press

  The Parting–A Novel of O.C.L.T.

  The Temple of Camazotz–an O.C.L.T. Novella

  NOVELLAS:

  Roll Them Bones

  The Preacher's Marsh

  The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs & The Currently Accepted Habits of Nature

  'Scuse Me, While I Kiss the Sky

  COLLECTIONS:

  The Fall of the House of Escher & Other Illusions

  Defining Moments

  A Taste of Blood & Roses

  Spinning Webs & Telling Lies

  The Whirling Man& Other Tales of Pain, Blood, and Madness

  Joined at the Muse

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  Roll Them Bones / Deep Blue / The Orffyreus Wheel / The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs & The Currently Accepted Habits of Nature / Heart of a Dragon / Vintage Soul / Darkness Falling / This is My Blood / On the Third Day / The Second Veil / I'll Have a Blue, Blue Christmas

  BUY DIRECT FROM CROSSROAD PRESS & SAVE!

  Try any title from CROSSROAD PRESS–use the Coupon Code FIRSTBOOK for a one-time 20% savings! We have a wide variety of eBook and Audiobook titles available.

  Find us at: http://store.crossroadpress.com

  CONTENTS

  SHORT STORIES

  Through an Eyeglass, Darkly

  Fear of Flying

  Moving On

  One Off From Prime

  Headlines

  Waynes World

  Redemption

  Swarm

  The Purloined Prose

  SHIFT

  Pretty Boys in Blue, and Long Hair Dangling

  To Strike a Timeless Chord

  Etched Deep

  Unique

  POETRY INCLUDED

  The Acropolis

  Clamdigger

  Cuttlefish Squeezings

  Thanatology

  A Poem of Adrian, Gray

  The Fishmonger

  Revelation

  Loch Ness

  Mirrored Hearts

  Dark Man

  Banished

  End of Days

  Longhaired Puppies

  Author's Foreword

  I am really pleased to present this collection because it contains some of my favorite pieces, oddball tales that were published in a wide variety of markets, but that don't fit any particular theme. Some of these were actually written for themed anthologies–few of those made it into the book they were aimed at. I have always taken the high road, following themes as loosely as possible and writing stories that I feel are uniquely my own.

  There are a couple of stories in this book that have seen very limited publication, and at least one, One Off From Prime, that is new for this volume. I have also chosen to add in some poetry–I did win an award for it, back in the day, and I still enjoy writing verse–just not as often as the muse drags me to stories, and these days, to novels.

  One poem in here was written specifically for the love of my life, Patricia Lee Macomber. That would be Dark Man, and I also included a collaborative story I wrote with Trish years ago, The Purloined Prose, our tribute to Edgar Allen Poe. The poem Mirrored Hearts appears directly in front of the story that breaks it apart and turns it into prose, and there is a poem about Loch Ness by none other than the infamous Angus Griswold, who also appears at another point in the story.

  One of my favorite things to do with fans is the "three word poetry challenge" invented by Rain Graves, who, along with author Mark McLaughlin, I share the Bram Stoker Award for poetry with for our joint collection The Gossamer Eye. Several of the fourteen poems in here were written for such a challenge, where you take three words–any three words–and give them to me, and I have to use all three in a poem. Some of those not marked as three word challenge were still created that way, like Thanatology and Long Haired Puppies. If you'd like to see how it works, drop me a note on Facebook and I'll see what I can make of your challenge.

  Some of these are very old stories. They are not written in a style I'd use today, and I've edited them lightly, but I've tried to preserve their original state. It's hard for an author to do that–to let the words go without tweaking and poking at them. I've done my best.

  I hope you'll enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it, and revisiting all these words to put it together.

  David Niall Wilson

  January, 2012

  Through an Eyeglass, Darkly

  The room adjoining Monica's therapist's office was lined with shelves and cabinets filled with bottles and tubes of paint, multi-hued chalk, boxes of colored pencils, small and large tubs of clay and putty, blocks and sand. There were charcoal pencils and crayons, markers, and flip-tablets of rough-surfaced drawing paper. Easels leaned in the corners, and sunlight streamed in a high window.

  Other cabinets held row after row of toy soldiers, police, movie characters and a smattering of elves and dwarves. There were animals and trees, houses and buildings of all sorts, cars, motorcycles, buses and trains. Even a small fleet of die-cast aircraft and military assault vehicles nosed out toward the room beyond.

  "Expression is the key," Monica whispered, mimicking the doctor's faintly nasal New England twang.

  She sat alone at one of the small tables and tried to look interested. She'd never get out of this place if she didn't create something. She was expected to bring her emotions to the surface, direct them to her fingers, and then bring them to life. That was the ideal concept of this therapy.

  The truth of it was, more often than not, Monica and her "peers" doodled on one of the drawing pads, or played with the toy soldiers and left them in some arcane pattern in the large sandpit lining one long wall just to give Dr. Brubaker something to contemplate.

  For Monica, there were practical concerns as well. She rarely used the paints, because they required too much preparation and skill, and the chalk left colored dust all over her hands that invariably ended up on her clothes, marking her as surely as if they'd put a scarlet "L" on her forehead for lunatic. For the time it took her to change clothes and rid the pores of her skin of the rainbow colored dust, she felt she wore the horrors of her past a
nd the neon-advertisement of her therapy for all to see.

  It was supposed to help her deal with him. Daddy. Father. Anthony Pettigrew was gone, physically, but mentally and emotionally he was as much a part of her life as he'd ever been, possibly more. The slight hope had always glimmered that, if he would die, she would be okay. If he would just go away, everything could be normal, and she'd have friends and a life. That hope, flimsy and pathetic, had been like a lifeline to her. Now she knew it as just another lie from the truthless heart of the universe.

  And he haunted her.

  Dr. Brubaker believed her father was a disease that could be excised, a poisoned part of her psyche that could be cut out and bandaged over. If so, the disease had spread to the doctor himself. The image of a large, mole-like protrusion growing from her temple had dragged Monica screaming from deep sleep and dreams more than once. In those dreams, Dr. Brubaker gripped the growth tightly with a set of forceps and yanked it free, ripping the roots of her mind and sanity out strand by strand as his monotonous, toneless voice droned on about "inner power" and "repression of fear."

  So, the question was, what to excise today. Monica grabbed one of the large pads and a charcoal pencil. She didn't choose these because she had any particular talent for them, just because they were close and easy.

  Now the problem shifted to the paper. It was empty, and white. The charcoal was dark, midnight black. Her thoughts ran deep, dark red, and would not organize themselves into any geometric pattern, or seemingly meaningful symbol she could slash across the too-bright surface of the paper.

  Monica closed her eyes and placed the tip of the charcoal to the paper. She let her mind drift, and it came to rest against a memory, lines tied off in seconds and all ashore that's going ashore. She sat in her room alone. On her desk, rather than schoolbooks, she had spread out the Ouija board her aunt had given her for Christmas. Pressed into place at the back of the desk and held there by the board, a photograph of her mother watched her with what appeared to be cynical amusement.

  She heard her father's deep, rasping breath as he forced his twisted, Polio-stricken form down the hall. He moved very quickly despite his handicap, and she knew now, as she had known then, that she had no time. The loud smack of his worn and battered walker on the hardwood floor of the hall was quick and syncopated perfectly with the shuffling of his feet and the grunting of his breath.

  The board, or the photo, that was her choice. There wasn't time to hide both, and either might send him into a rage. Monica cried out softly, yanked her desk drawer open and tore the photo loose from where it rested. She tossed it into the drawer and slammed it into place, just as the doorknob spun violently. Her father's breathing reached a crescendo, escalating from rasping to a raucous cough that rattled the door and drove Monica back into her seat more tightly with a mewl of fear.

  He lurched into the room and slammed his hand down onto her desk and the Ouija board so hard that the walls shook.

  He ignored the board and glared at her. He saw her hand on the handle of the desk drawer, turned, and there it was. Poking out from behind the board as if reaching out to him, as Monica's mother might have done in life, was the bottom right corner of the photograph. It had torn.

  Then he looked at the board. Sweat beaded on his grizzled face and his eyes gleamed with a wild, yellowish tint. His mouth curled into a sneer of contempt, and he picked it up, holding it out before him to scrutinize it as if it were a painting.

  "Trying to talk to mommy, are you?" he asked. His voice was low, but she felt the tremor of anger behind it, and said nothing.

  "Did you get through?"

  He swiveled his gaze to her so quickly that she was trapped, caught looking up and unable to glance away, though her feet scrabbled ineffectually for purchase and she leaned back, scuffing the legs across the floor and knowing the ruts this caused would anger him more. Again, she was too late.

  "Doesn't look like homework, Monica," he said, shaking his head sorrowfully from side to side. "Didn't you get a B in English last semester? Didn't I tell you what would happen to you if you sank so low again? Don't you have an essay due the day after tomorrow?"

  The questions were short and clipped. He didn't hesitate between them to allow her to answer.

  He held the Ouija board up to his ear and cocked his head. He shook it.

  "You in there, Em?" he asked. "You hear me?"

  He shook it a final time, glanced at it quizzically, and then turned. Like a snake, he lashed out, drawing the board up over his head and bringing it down flat on her head. The sudden impact drover her neck down into her shoulders, numbing her from the top of her scalp to her elbows.

  "Nobody's home," he growled, tossing the board aside so hard that it crashed into her bookshelf and sent her collection of fantasy figurines flying and tinkling in all directions. Most of them had been painstakingly glued back together after countless assaults, and Monica granted them only a quick squeak of dismay. She couldn't see straight, and what had started as a faint tingle in her neck and shoulders had spread, stabbing into her with icy pricks of pain. Tears squeezed out at the corners of her hard-squinting eyes.

  "I want to see the essay tonight," he said flatly. All pseudo amusement had departed his features, and his jaw was tight. He gripped the handle of the walker so tightly his forearm trembled. "There had better be no mistakes, this time. If there are, you will write it again, and again. There are many hours before morning."

  He spun on one leg of the walker and stormed out of the room. The door slammed behind him and echoed deep in her mind, pounding and pounding on the tiny spikes of pain.

  Monica opened her eyes, and the "creativity therapy" room came into sharp, sudden focus. She glanced down at the once-blank paper and blinked. Lines shivered across the surface, crude, but clear. There were letters, a sun and a moon, words. It was a Ouija board and she drew back from it in sudden, trembling horror. She had no memory of drawing it, or anything.

  Crushing the charcoal pencil in a sudden adrenalin-fueled grip of her fist, she threw the pieces to the corners of the room and pushed away from the table. With a soft cry, she turned and ran, slamming through the door, the outer office, and into the waiting room behind. She was breathing too fast, her heart beating too hard, but she couldn't stop. Moments later she was out the front door and onto the street, moving toward her father's old Dodge Dart at a staggering run.

  Several school children hovered near the old car, and they scattered at the sight of her, chattering wildly. Monica dragged the door open, slid inside and slammed herself in tight. She leaned forward with her head in her hands, face tucked into the steering wheel, and fought for breath. She did not turn or look back toward Dr. Brubaker's office. She didn't want to know if he'd followed her out, or if someone else had. She was not going back there. Not now.

  Monica fumbled in the pocket of her jeans and came up with her car keys. She never carried a purse, and in that instant she was glad of it. If she had, it would no doubt be sitting somewhere in Dr. Brubaker's office, waiting for her to slink back in with her tail between her legs in search of it, all of them watching her. Pitying her. Disgusted with her.

  She jammed the key into the ignition and turned viciously.

  Her world exploded in light and sound, and she screamed.

  The windshield wipers slapped wildly. Indecipherable music blared from the speakers at full volume. Monica slapped at the closest thing, the steering wheel, and the horn blared. She turned, caught sight of the laughing faces of the children, innocent moments before, now leering at her in undisguised glee. Every one of them had his eyes.

  She jammed the Dart into reverse and slapped her foot on the gas. Miraculously, none of the children was standing behind her. Miraculously, no one was on the street, and she remembered to spin the wheel. She dragged the shift lever to drive and burned rubber out of the parking lot, narrowly missing a taxi pulling away from the curb, and careened around the first corner at roughly double the speed limit.
r />   By the time she'd reached the first stoplight she'd managed to get the wipers turned off, and a moment later, after hysterical effort that nearly ended in ripping the knob from the radio, she silenced the music, as well. The ensuing silence was eerie and profound. The blare of horns from behind her snapped her back to reality, and she scooted through the light, just as the yellow faded back to red, stranding those behind her for another cycle.

  Monica screwed up her courage, cleansed her mind of everything but the wheel, and the road, and drove cautiously home.

  Monica answered the call from Dr. Brubaker's office, apologized for her outburst and scheduled her next session. Yes, it was an interesting drawing she'd left. Yes, it might be important–a breakthrough, even. Yes, they could discuss it the following week, and yes–she had taken her meds.

  Now she stood on rubbery, weak-kneed legs in the hallway outside her father's "den" and stared at the heavy wooden door. Den was a very good name for this place, she reflected. She had an idea it had more in common with the lairs of wolves and predatory bears than any place human beings would frequent, but…she didn't know. She had never seen. Even after her father's death, the room had mocked her.

  The police had been through it, but before she'd moved back in, Monica had asked them to close it back off. She could handle the kitchen, and the shared spaces of the house, but she hadn't been ready for this.

  She wasn't sure she was ready for it now.

  Monica opened the door and gave it a light shove, standing her ground. The door swung open with a creak. Nothing leaped from the shadows and there was no sound. She stepped forward, reached around the corner and flipped on the light.

  Monica didn't know what she'd expected, but she wasn't prepared for what she saw. There was furniture, a desk, long bookshelves, and curio cabinets, all of rich, dark wood. There were leather chairs flanking an ornate chess set, and antique slag glass panes in deep green and burgundy muted the overhead light.