From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (107 page)

Brian James Freeman

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Brian James Freeman is the author of many short stories, essays, non-fiction, novellas, and novels. He is also the publisher of Lonely Road Books where he has worked with Stephen King, Mick Garris, Stewart O’Nan, and other acclaimed authors. Brian lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, two cats, and a German Shorthaired Pointer who is afraid of the cats. More books are on the way.

Table of Contents

title

copyright

dedication

intro

introquotes

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

chapter 12

chapter 13

chapter 14

chapter 15

chapter 16

chapter 17

chapter 18

chapter 19

chapter 20

chapter 21

chapter 22

chapter 23

afterword

about the author

*

There is an old man sitting in a bed on Angel ward, telling stories.

He says he has to tell someone, because he is dying. He says he doesn't care if you believe the tales are true or not, because he is not sure that half of them ever happened at all. Reg Weldon claims that he has seen things that would make your skin crawl. He claims a lot of things...

"I was born four seconds before the strike of midnight, on the 31st December 1900. As far as I know that makes me the last person to be born in
that century. My mother, god bless her soul, she may well have been the first person to die in the century that followed, because no sooner had I taken my first breath, than she took her last."

*

I was born four seconds before the strike of midnight, on the 31st December 1900. As far as I know that makes me the last person to be born in that century. My mother, god bless her soul, she may well have been the first person to die in the century that followed, because no sooner had I taken my first breath than she took her last.

My name is Reginald Joseph Weldon or Reg if you want. That
’s what most folks call me. I’ve lived through and fought in two world wars, and I’ve loved just one woman in my life, just one.

I met her the night before my eighth birthday, and that brief meeting was only one of the events that set my life hurtling on a course that I
’d never expected, though it was certainly the only good one, but I will get to all of that soon enough. There are too many other things I need to say.

It
’s 2002 now, so they tell me, 2002. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? A whole new century came and went, without as much as a wave. If we’re counting, then that makes me a hundred and one years old, and well, there doesn’t seem to be much else to do at my age but count the days.

It seems strange to me that it has taken over a hundred years to arrive at a place in my life where I find it necessary that someone else knows about some of the things that I
’ve come to know.

As I lie in my bed at night, in this hospital, I wonder how many days, or even hours I have left to tell my tales to whoever may one day hear them. It doesn
’t really matter though, just so long as I get to say everything I need to say.

Get it all out.

I couldn’t write any of it down, not now. My hands just don’t do what they are told to do these days. It's arthritis, apparently. That’s what the doctors say. It must have crept in over the years without me noticing it.

I did try writing, even bought a brand n
ew pen and a journal and all that, but my hands hurt a lot, especially when it’s cold. You know, I still remember a time when the cold didn’t mean anything to me.

So I bought this new Dictaphone tape thing. It cost a small fortune. One of the nurses, Emma
I think her name is, was kind enough to pick it up for me, said she was going to the electronics store anyway. I’m not sure if she was. I think that maybe she was just being nice.

They call it Angel Ward, and do you know, I couldn
’t think of a more apt name than that. On this ward, all they really do is spend their time easing the way out for those of us who won't be leaving here alive.

Angels, every one of them.

Why did I wait so long to say anything? What possessed me to hide everything away without speaking a word, right up until death was taking its first glances at me? I don’t know really, but I do know that my time is nearing an end. I can feel it approaching as the days pass, a light caress as I lay sleeping, a sharp nudge as I’m sitting up trying to eat, and a lingering glance as I struggle on my way to the lounge for my afternoon read. It’s always there, waiting, just waiting, always ready to remind me that it won’t be long now.

Not long at all.

I don’t think we ever really expect our time here to end, I know that I never have. Maybe that’s it. Until a few weeks ago when they told me what was happening to me, that things were going to go bad, and pretty fast as well, I had never even considered that one day it would all be over. I always believed I would get my chance again, and that I wouldn’t miss it this time.

I would be ready next time.

I remember a lot of things about my life, and most of those memories are vivid, like they happened only a few days ago. I think that must be my gift. We all have a gift don’t we? Something we excel at, though I think not everybody discovers what that gift may be.

There is one anomaly in my memories though, one area of my life that I don
’t recall so well, and that is my first few years. I remember where I was born, but I don’t remember much about the place.

The village was called Temperance, and it was a tiny place, just a few miles off what is now the M1 motorway, in Northamptonshire, tucked away in that ambling countryside, that for most folks just drifts past you th
rough a car window.

Don
’t ask me to tell you about how that place was back then, I spent a grand total of twelve months there, oblivious to the world as all newly born are, before my aunt took me all the way to London to live with her new husband, and that city is where I spent most of my childhood, most of my life, really. The town I was born in, and how it was before the war, is a very vague memory, and it would be so many long years before I went back there once more.

I do remember that my father didn
’t stay around for very long after I was born. I like to think he loved my mother too much to be able to cope with facing me once she was gone, but honestly, from the small amount I’ve been able to gleam about him, from odd tales that I’ve discovered in passing conversation with people who once knew him, I think that he just up and went, and was glad to see the back of the both of us.

Before my aunt died, when I was five years old, she told me that my mother was probably the nicest, happiest person that ever g
raced god’s earth, and that I was an almost identical image of her. I never knew her, and I don’t even remember her face, hell, I only shared this planet with my mother for barely a few seconds, but I do know I never heard of anyone that people liked more.

I do have a picture of her, a very old one that has become worn and faded over the years, but the face looking back at me doesn
’t trigger any memories.

During my early years I was a trouble maker of the worst kind. I had an attitude, to say the least. Whe
re that came from I don’t know. Maybe one of those psychiatrist types would have an idea, but all I know is I was an angry child, always on the look-out for trouble. And I can tell you this, that when you go around looking for it, as I did for most of my early life, you certainly find it.

I spent most of my younger years, the ones that followed the death of my aunt, hopping from one home to another, obliviously moving from one family to the next, and leaving a trail of destruction behind me. I didn
’t pick up many friends along the way, only a big, long line of folks who were probably glad to see me gone, and not just a few that might have liked to have seen something bad happen to me. It wasn’t until the safety of a home and a family was taken away that my ways changed.

One afternoon, not many days before my eighth birthday, in December of 1908, my life changed. It happened so fast that it took me a few days just for my head to catch up. One moment I had been happily sitting there, thinking the random thought
s of a child, and the next, a world far darker had descended upon me. It was the first time I had ever had to run for my life. It certainly wouldn’t be the last, but at barely eight years old you are neither expecting such a thing, nor are you prepared for it.

It was a year of bad weather where I lived at the time, just south of London in a town called Hilmoor. I remember the snow blizzards as clearly as if it had happened just yesterday, they seemed like they were ten feet tall, though I doubt that was the
reality.

I was living with a family who were related to me in some way, I think they were distant cousins, though I couldn
’t be sure of that. I was never told.

For the first time I seemed to have settled in quite nicely. I got on well with their two sons
- both of them were a few years older than me, but I tagged along and joined in with whatever games they decided we were going to play each day, and they didn’t seem to mind a little kid following them around.

The game they liked to play the most was called "who did it", a tricky game for a child of my age, I thought, and don
’t know which of the boys invented it, or if they had learned it from someone else, but I had never played it before.

It involved everyone
sitting on the ground, facing each other with a bunch of objects placed in the middle, just within reach. It didn’t matter what they were so long as they were small enough to fit in your hand. Rocks, pencils, apples, twigs, a small toy car, anything was game.

You had to sit quite close to each other so that everybody could touch the knees of those around them, and on a count of three everybody had to close their eyes.

Next came the part I couldn’t get, at least not at the start. You see the whole point of the game was to take stuff, and to take it without anybody noticing you had taken it. If you noticed someone taking something, you called out their name and said "put that back!" and everyone would open their eyes, and you put back whatever you had in your hand. When everything was gone from the middle, you counted up what you had taken, and the person with the most won.

I took me a long time to figure out that both the other boys didn
’t close their eyes all the way, they were just squinting. Every time I took something I got called out and every time they took something I never noticed. I didn’t suspect at all that they might be cheating, but then I hadn’t figured out that the whole point of the game was to fool the others. It was all about deception.

We pla
yed that game most days, for hours sometimes, and somewhere along the way I started to notice things. When one of the brothers would move to take something there was a rustle of clothes, or I’d feel the air move. I started to call them out. The more I played the game, the better I got at taking stuff. But I learned to fool them in a different way. When I took something I took more than one thing, and when I got called out I put one thing back and dropped another thing neatly in the pile behind me.

Deception
has many forms.

Soon I began to win every game, and the brothers started to get irritated by that. I loved that game so much, I found myself cheating so that I would lose and let them win.

I think I learned some of my most valuable lessons sitting on the ground out in the back yard with the brothers, playing that game. How the mind could be tricked so easily if you just thought a little out of the box, how you could make someone notice something with the slightest of gestures.

The week before my ordeal it had snowed so hard that we couldn
’t find a patch of ground dry enough and we had to find something else to do. So we made an igloo. Well, at least they called it an igloo. In truth it was really just a hole in the snow, with the sides made hard by patting them down with our gloves. We had borrowed a few pairs of their father’s work gloves for the job, though I’m not sure he knew about that. Anyway, we dug into the snow about five feet, and made ourselves a little snug den in there. We tried putting a roof of snow on it but it kept on collapsing in on us.

You know that just a few months ago I watched a television programme about Eskimos, and how they make their homes, those real igloos. Well, I la
ughed until I cried as it reminded me of the igloo we made, and I wondered if the Eskimos really lived in those igloos, or if it was just something traditional that had turned into an art form. Wish I’d known about making snow bricks way back in 1908.

Alex
ander, who was the older of the two brothers, found a piece of wood to lay on the floor, and some sack cloth from their father’s workshop, and we laid out the place like a little house, and sat playing trumps for hours on end.

The house was just on the edg
e of the town, which wasn’t very big anyway, and the yard led to a dirt track that ran for about a quarter of a mile behind the back yards of the other houses in the same row, with tall trees and hedgerows along both sides. Our little igloo was about a hundred yards over the back fence and down that track.

I didn
’t learn what it was that their father did for a living until the day after we made that igloo. He seemed to meet a lot of people in his workshop, which was a brick-built affair, right at the bottom of their yard, with a sheet-metal roof that was rusted and near to collapsing in. We were never allowed in that workshop, though the folks he dealt with often arrived in a wagon, or on foot, to meet him at the back gate and head into the workshop to discuss whatever it was they talked about.

Most of the time they left carrying some case or sack, and looking quite happy with themselves. But on rare occasions, if you hung around outside the yards, in the alleyway you could hear them haggling over money, or a
rguing about something.

The boys
’ father, who I was told I had to call Mr Holcroft, was a harsh man with a taste for whiskey, and you could smell it on his breath pretty much all of the time. I don’t think he liked me very much. He always complained about having another kid to feed, and how they barely had the money to pay for their own kids. I heard him and his wife arguing occasionally about it. He was usually complaining, and she was telling him that it wouldn’t be for long, she was just helping out her friend in the city for a while.

Truth was, over the months I was there, the conversations that I heard changed somewhat. She started off on the defence, but eventually she began agreeing with him, and then the conversations stopped entirely. Though I felt
as settled as I had ever been, I was aware that my stay there would not be a long one.

Over the week before, there was a lot of business being done out of that back yard. I think that Mr Holcroft had chosen the wrong bunch of folks to try and deal with, n
ot that anyone he dealt with was the right type, because the afternoon of the day after we made the igloo, while his two sons were out with their mother, and I was the only other person around, things got a little out of hand.