From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (106 page)

(11)

Henry was sniffling and hiding under his bed when he heard the front door of the house open and close. The room had grown dark as the sun disappeared for the day and he was still wearing his yellow rain slicker. His clothing was soaked in sweat, his face was wet with tears. A puddle from the snow melting off his boots trickled across the hardwood floor. He sobbed until his eyes burned.

The bedroom door opened and his father’s familiar work boots crossed the room, landing every step with a dull thud.

His father’s pants were stained with grease and grime and bleach. He took a knee and then, after a brief moment, his weathered, callused hand reached under the bed. Henry grabbed onto the hand, not believing it was really there, but his father gently pulled him out from under the bed just the same.

“What are you doing under there?” his father asked.

“The monsters…I saw the monsters get you,” Henry whimpered before sobbing uncontrollably again.

“Son, that’s silly. What do you mean?”

Henry couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t even get the words to form.

His father said: “It’ll be okay, Henry. Just start at the beginning and the rest will take care of itself.”

While Henry’s father helped him out of his rain slicker and into some dry clothing, Henry told him everything he had seen and done, including the fall from the tree house, the herd of rabbits, the trip down the river, and the monsters in the boiler room of the school.

Henry’s father held him and rocked him while he cried some more. His father said: “Well, Henry, it sounds like your imagination really got away from you today, didn’t it?”

Henry only nodded, unable to believe none of what happened had been real. He had the cuts on his face from the fall, after all, and his heart ached with a deep pain.

His father said, “When the weather gets a little nicer, we’ll go look at that tree house together, what do you say?”

Henry nodded.

“You okay?”

Henry shook his head and blurted: “I was so scared of the monsters!”

“Henry,” his father said, “the monsters don’t live in the dark corners waiting to pounce on us. They live deep in our heart. But we can fight them. I promise you, we can fight them and we can win. Why don’t you get a piece of paper and some crayons. I know something that’ll help you feel better.”

Henry retrieved his paper and his crayons and he sat on the floor in the beam of moonlight coming through the window.

“Okay, draw the clearing with the tree house,” his father instructed, standing next to him.

Henry did as his father told him to the best of his ability, using his green and brown crayons.

“Now, add the skeleton you told me about.”

Henry hesitated. He didn’t want to think about the skeleton anymore.

“It’s okay, trust me.”

Henry didn’t have a white crayon, so he used yellow. The skeleton was sort of hanging off the tree, drawn on top of the branches.

“Now, put a big red X over it.”

Henry looked up at his father, who simply nodded at the paper.

Again, Henry did as his father instructed, only instead of drawing an X, he crossed back and forth over the skeleton a dozen times with the red crayon.

“Good! Use the yellow to add a nice happy sun.”

Henry was already feeling better and he suddenly understood what his father was showing him: he could remove the bad and scary things from the pictures and replace them with something he liked better. Maybe he couldn’t make those changes in the real world, but he certainly could in his imagination. And if removing those bad things and adding the good things on paper made him feel better
inside
, that was okay, right?

Henry’s father handed him another sheet of paper and this time Henry drew the frozen river at the moment the ice began to crack. He didn’t need his father’s guidance now that he understood the power of what he was doing.

In fact, within minutes Henry didn’t even feel like he was sitting in his bedroom. He wasn’t seeing the paper and the crayons in the moonlight. Instead he was on the river again, hearing the ice cracking—and then fixing it. As he built this imaginary world around himself, he created a place where he didn’t fall through the ice or out of the tree house, where there were no scary birds in the trees and no monsters in the basement of the school.

For the first time, Henry was able to cross between the imaginary worlds he created in the backyard and transfer them into the real world simply by drawing the images on the paper.

Eventually his father slipped away and Henry continued to draw deep into the night. And as Henry worked, the words he had seen in the colorful darkness behind his eyes appeared in his mind again.

I paint
against
the darkness,
Henry thought.

He liked the sound of that. Those words made him feel strong in a way he couldn’t describe. Those words opened doors within his mind; they set him free and they gave him the courage to face the darkest night. He was no longer afraid of the terrifying things he was drawing. After all, he could make them go away the moment they got too scary.

I paint
against
the darkness.

The monsters were simply shadows to be erased or drawn over, nothing more, nothing less.

(11)

A Family Found

Henry is numb, but gloved hands are shaking him. He rolls over in the snow and stares into the darkness and at first he sees nothing but a memory:

Gray and blue sky, clouds gliding to the east. A tree towering above him. A hole in the floor of a dilapidated tree house. A skeleton wearing a yellow rain slicker and boots. A chain necklace, a tarnished silver crucifix.

With his bruised and bloody hands, Henry touches inside his tattered shirt, feels the metal pressing on his chest. After all of these years, he still wears the necklace he found in the tree house when he was a boy. Even after he forgot where it came from, he has worn the necklace every day, touching it for comfort without knowing why.

Then the darkness rushes into Henry’s field of vision before being pushed away by the dancing orange light engulfing him: the blazing inferno that was once his home.

Out of the darkness above comes the snow, falling in waves.

And then, finally, Sarah’s face appears. And little Dillon. His cheeks are red and round, his eyes wide. Henry’s wife and son are speaking, but he can’t yet hear the words. They’re both beautiful like angels.

Henry closes his eyes and his imagination shows him what will happen next:

He and his family huddling in the garage around a small fire, which they’ll start with the burning debris spread across their snowy lawn.

His family watching the storm pound the countryside for the rest of the night while their home burns into the cellar.

The fire department and the police arriving in the morning after the storm, when someone reports the thick black smoke.

His family being driven from the property, never to return.

Their search for a new home where he’ll build a new studio…but this time, Henry will stay in control of his imagination, he won’t let the imaginary world trapped inside his mind control his real life. Not ever again.

And as the coldness wraps around Henry, he smiles and he hugs his wife and his son—and he vows to never let them go, no matter what.

(12)

When Henry’s mother came into his bedroom, it was long after midnight and Henry was drawing intensely in the dark. He was dressed in his pajamas and an unfamiliar silver crucifix dangled from his neck, nearly touching the floor as he crouched over his paper.

“Henry! Are you okay?” his mother cried, throwing herself to her knees and hugging her son tightly. He barely flinched, just continued with his work.

When his mother saw this, she grabbed his hand, breaking the crayon in his palm with a sharp snap. That shook Henry from his waking dream, from the place he had gone while he was drawing, his imaginary world.

“What’s wrong?” Henry asked when he saw the smeared mascara on his mother’s face and the fresh tears pouring from her eyes. He had never seen his mother like this in his entire life. She was always radiant and lovely in the way only a mother can be to her children.

“Henry, where have you been?” she asked, wiping her eyes.

Henry grew even more confused when the State Police officer stepped into the room and turned on the light. The light was blinding and somehow awful; Henry blinked and covered his face.

“Mommy, what’s wrong?”

“Henry,” his mother said, wiping her eyes with one hand while holding on to her son’s arm with the other, as if to make sure he was truly real. “Ms. Winslow reported you missing this afternoon. We’ve been searching for you for hours!”

She started sobbing and pulled him tight. Henry was stunned. He said: “What do you mean? Dad knew where I was.”

Henry’s mother couldn’t stop crying and she didn’t respond.

“Mommy, what’s wrong?”

“Son,” the State Trooper said, kneeling and stroking Henry’s hair, “I’m afraid I have some bad news. Your father died in an accident at the school today. I’m very sorry.”

Henry shook his head. No, that wasn’t right. He struggled to free himself from his mother’s grip, but she wouldn’t let go. Henry started to cry and shake—not because the State Trooper said his father was dead, but because his mother wouldn’t loosen her grip, not even a little. Didn’t she understand? Henry could fix this, but he had to get to his paper and his crayons. He could make the bad things disappear if she’d just let him!

“I paint
against
the darkness,”
Henry said as he fought to pull himself free from his mother.

But his mother kept holding Henry as tight as she could, as if she planned to never let him go again, and the State Trooper returned to the living room to give them some privacy while he called off the search for the missing boy.

Did I Really Commit Career Suicide by Giving

The Painted Darkness

Away for Free?

by Brian James Freeman

When I told some writer friends that I wanted to give The Painted Darkness away for free months before the publication of the hardcover, there was a wide variety of reactions, but one person was blunt: “You’re committing career suicide if you do that!”

Why would introducing my work to thousands of potential readers be career suicide? My friend’s fear was simple: if everyone could read the book for free, they wouldn’t buy the hardcover, leading to terrible sales numbers, which would result in publishers rejecting my books in the future.

So why did I decide to conduct this experiment? Simple: without readers, a story is just words on the page, but finding readers is difficult, especially with all of the other entertainment options in the marketplace. Over the years publishers have told me they just don’t know how to sell my work. For example, my newest novel was labeled as being:

* too commercial by every major literary imprint.

* too literary by every major commercial publisher.

* too dark for a mainstream audience.

* not dark enough for a genre audience.

Essentially, none of the editors who read the manuscript felt they could find enough readers for the book. Fair enough. I certainly understand where they’re coming from. Buying a book to publish is a judgment call you make from your gut and your heart. Do you love this book enough to champion it into the marketplace? Once there, will there be enough readers to buy the book to justify the decision you made?

Now I’m going to admit something here that a writer should never, ever say anywhere near a publisher in this day and age where “moving a lot of units” matters more than anything:

Before I offered this eBook for free, I had no idea if anyone really wanted to read what I write.

I mean, yes, there were readers I heard from on a regular basis, asking for more. (God bless them.) But maybe there really wasn’t a big market for these stories I feel compelled to put on paper. Maybe it was a small market. Maybe it was a medium-sized market. Maybe there was no real market at all!

So how exactly could I figure out how many readers there might be for my particular brand of fiction, which doesn’t fall easily into a category?

I’d been intensely curious about that question for a few years, and that’s why I gave The Painted Darkness away for free.

After all, there are millions of readers in the world, lots of them enjoy “dark” stories, and everyone likes free stuff... so what better way to find the readers who might like my work than to give them a free book? Then there would be no reason for any reader to wait to find out for sure if they liked what I’m doing here. And hey, if they weren’t interested in the premise enough to read the book when it was free, they were never going to buy the hardcover anyway, right?

In the end, more than 30,000 people downloaded the free eBook, and hundreds of those readers wrote message board posts about the book or reviewed it on their blogs... which is why we’ve sold thousands of copies of the hardcover and the paid eBook continues to sell extremely well, month after month. The results have been astonishing. We’ve definitely sold more copies of both editions than I ever expected or even dared hope.

Some people in the publishing business were confident my free eBook experiment was doomed from the beginning, but I’m thrilled to have met so many great new readers who are genuinely interested in my work. There’s no feeling in the world like knowing someone lost an afternoon to reading something you wrote.

Now go read a new book and be sure to tell a friend about it... because without readers sharing their favorites with other readers, we’re all in trouble.

Best wishes,