The Painted Darkness (8 page)

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.
THE PAINTED DARKNESS

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.

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 BRIAN JAMES FREEMAN

“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.
THE PAINTED DARKNESS

“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.

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.

DID I REALLY COMMIT “CAREER SUICIDE” BY GIVING THE PAINTED DARKNESSAWAY FOR FREE?

give this book away for free months before the publication of the hardcover, there was a wide variety of reactions, but one person was really quite blunt: “You’re committing career suicide if you do that!”

Let’s hope not.
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 appalling sales numbers, which could become a reason for publishers to reject my books in the future.
In the end, I decided to try this experiment anyway.
Like most authors, I write because it’s something I enjoy doing and there are stories in my head that demand to be written…but without readers, a story is just words on the page.
Finding readers is difficult, especially with all of the other entertainment options in the marketplace, and over the years publishers have told me they just don’t know how to sell my work. For example:
My newest novel was called “too commercial” by every major literary imprint.
The novel was also called “too literary” by every major commercial publisher.
The novel was much too dark for a mainstream audience.
The novel wasn’t dark enough for a genre audience.
You get the idea.
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?
Ultimately, what we enjoy reading is a matter of personal preference. What I love, you may hate. What you hate, I may love. That’s what makes discussing books (and short fiction—don’t forget the power of a good short story) so much fun.
Which is why I’m going to admit something here that a writer should never, ever say anywhere near a publisher in this day and age where selling a ton of copies seems to matter more than anything:
I have no idea if anyone really wants to read what I write.
I mean, yes, there are readers I hear from on a regular basis, asking for more. (God bless them.) But maybe there really isn’t a big market for these stories I feel compelled to put on paper. Maybe it’s a small market. Maybe it’s a medium-sized market. Maybe there’s no real market at all.
So how exactly do I figure out how many readers there are for my particular brand of fiction?
I’ve been intensely curious about that question for a few years now, and that’s why we’re giving 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 to sample?
We think there are readers who will enjoy The Painted Darkness, and now there’s no excuse for them to wait to find out for sure. 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?
We believe there will be three different possible reactions from readers who take the time to download this eBook:

If you sign-up for my email newsletter, you’ll also receive another FREE eBook later this year. And hey, the list is free, I don’t send a lot of newsletters, so you really have nothing to lose, right?

2) If you’re just happy having read The Painted Darkness for free and you don’t need a copy of the hardcover, that’s okay, too. It’s why we’re doing this, after all. Please consider using the links above to be notified about my future works. And like I said, I’ll be sending another free eBook to my newsletter subscribers later this year. 3) If this book wasn’t your cup of tea, thanks for stopping by and giving my work a fair shot. I appreciate you taking the time. Maybe we’ll meet again down the road.

No matter what your reaction, if you know anyone who might be interested in what we’re doing here, please consider spreading the word. We’d certainly appreciate any readers you could send our way. You might just introduce someone to a book he or she will love, and every reader knows there’s no better feeling.

Some people are confident this experiment is doomed, but that doesn’t make them right, so let’s give it a try and see what happens. Worse-case scenario, I’ve committed some form of career suicide. Best-case scenario, a lot of readers who didn’t know my work will soon—and hopefully some of them will come back for more.

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

amassed an impressive collection of short stories—consistently among the most memorable works in each anthology he appears in. Who can forget “Answering the Call” in Borderlands 5? Or in Shivers II, “Marking the Passage of Time,” which in a mere four pages manages to deliver a devastating emotional punch. His prose style is direct and efficient, while still managing to convey the atmosphere and intensity necessary for the best horror stories. And as proven by his bold debut novel Black Fire (published under the James Kidman pseudonym), he’s also not afraid to experiment with structure and point of view—I still remember the “I can’t believe he pulled that off ” admiration I experienced when racing through that novel’s surprising final pages.

He’s back with a new name, Brian James Freeman (more about that later), and a new book, The Painted Darkness. I got an early look at The Painted Darkness, and it’s just as smart and engrossing and original as I’ve come to expect from him, whatever name he writes under. The good news is that the book will be available in an affordable trade edition from Cemetery Dance.

BJF
: About five years ago, my wife and I bought a fixer-upper that was heated by a boiler very much like the one in the story. Our boiler was actually older than the house, though. The house was built in 1941 but they installed a coal boiler built in 1904. Someone suggested the builder had probably used a boiler from another building that had burned down or been condemned around the time our house was built. Comforting thought, right? That in itself could inspire a story.

Somewhere along the way the boiler in our house had been converted from coal to oil, and it required a regular maintenance schedule to fill and drain the tank, but the consequences for forgetting the maintenance was not nearly as dire as I suggest in the story. We were told the unit would probably just shut down.

So the boiler was one element that inspired the story, but just as important was the drain in the middle of our basement. I’ve never seen eyes looking up at me from that drain, but I’ve certainly wondered what might be living down there. These two thoughts started getting intertwined and before too long I had the story of an artist in a farmhouse facing down a monster from his past.

I don’t recall how The Painted Darkness ended up being set in the old farmhouse, but a large part of Henry’s childhood is pulled from my own experiences as a child who spent a lot of time imagining things that weren’t there in the woods.
CD:
It’s an unusual size for a horror story— way too long for short story magazines or anthologies, but too short for the stand-alone books we typically see from a mass-market publisher. Did you ever consider making the story shorter, or expanding it into a novel?

BJF:
I was supposed to be working on a novel when I started The Painted Darkness, but I knew it wasn’t going to be that long. I had thought it was going to be around 10,000 words, which is still too long for a magazine or anthology and much too short for anyone outside the small press to consider publishing in general. I probably should have stopped right there, but the story really gripped me and it seemed like Henry’s tale just had to be written.

As sometimes happens, the story grew as I went, ending up at around 25,000 words. That’s still much too short for the bigger publishers, but it made the book a solid novella and novellas have done quite well in the small press, especially in the horror genre.

Cemetery Dance’s own Novella Series has had many acclaimed titles and several other publishers have copied that line in their own ways over the years. The genre just seems to do well at the novella length. Long enough to suck the reader in, but not so long as to lose all of the tension, as often happens with a novel.

I had thoughts about whether The Painted Darkness could somehow be a novel, but the important parts of the story were told in that 25,000 words. Anything I could add would probably just be padding for the sake of padding, and that would only hurt the story.

CD:
You’ve written novels (Black Fire, from Leisure and CD Publications, under the James Kidman pseudonym), a novella (Blue November Storms from CD), and numerous short stories (in Borderlands 5 and CD’s Shivers series, to name a few). Which is your favorite story form to write in?

BJF:
Easily the short stories, although novellas are growing on me. I spend far too much time on each novel and the form doesn’t come easily to me. I think I was meant to write short stories and maybe novellas, which doesn’t bode well for my agent!
CD:
There’s a lot of interior art in the book— which is appropriate, considering the story’s main character is an artist. How did you choose the illustrator? How did you select what scenes needed an image?

BJF:
When it came time to discuss the interior artwork, I knew I really wanted a handful of B&W pieces at key moments. That just felt right given the content of the book.

Rich Chizmar agreed and Jill Bauman came to mind immediately when we discussed who would be a good fit. I’ve worked with many talented artists over the years, but she drew some fantastic illustrations for my previous novella, Blue November Storms, and I knew she’d bring the right approach to this book. Her artwork perfectly captured the mood of the scenes, which she selected when she read the manuscript, and she turned in even more art than we expected. She just did a wonderful job.