Prologue

The Awakening

A Darkness Book One

By David Peters

Copyright © 2012 by David Peters

This story is dedicated to my wife, my anchor. This one is yours.

All characters in the book are fictional. Any similarity to actual living, dead, ethereal beings is purely coincidental. If, thirty years down the road, they find that what I wrote has now become known science, then, yeah, I knew it all along.

Prologue

Darkness.

That single, shadowed word pretty much sums up my life and everything in it. Every aspect of my world seems to revolve around it. Even going as far back as my first memory takes me, it is the Darkness I see, the Darkness I remember. I couldn’t have been any older than three or four at the time. I was standing in the small living room of our second story two bedroom apartment I called home that week. My favorite toy airplane in one hand and a spill proof cup of apple juice in the other. I hear the fumbling of keys outside the front door. Several failed attempts at getting the key in the door before my mother stumbles in with her boyfriend-du-jour.

That was the first time I really noticed it, the first time I was really aware of what was there. I could see it around her but more important to the situation I could see it around him. I don’t know why I found it so odd that he had a shadow. I had always taken it for granted that my mom had one and I had just assumed that’s how it was. I had grown accustomed to it and never gave it another thought until that moment. There, standing side-by-side, I could see it.

He had the Darkness too. But his was remarkably different from my mother’s. His had a much more sinister flair to it. If you took the mocking evil laugh from some villain in a movie and gave it a look, a color, it would be his Darkness. The general shape was similar to the one surrounding my mother but the motions and colors were far more dramatic, more energetic, and more unpredictable. To say it was discomforting would be an understatement. Some part of me new to fear those colors, those flashes of light.

Later that evening as his shadow grew and the Vodka bottles in the cupboards did the opposite, I got the distinct feeling I didn’t want to be there. He didn’t seem a particularly evil man, just a very unhappy and violent drunkard. The more they drank the more unpredictable the flashes in his Darkness became. My mother had made a slurred comment on his manhood, or lack thereof, and I had seen a ripple flow around his shadow. I didn’t understand what my mother’s comment meant at the time but I could see quite clearly that he did. His Darkness was flashing with a mad brilliance of colors. So many that it overwhelmed me. I fled the room in absolute terror.

I hid under the dirty clothes piled on the floor in my closet and stayed there until I fell asleep. Come morning, the sound of my mother cursing in the kitchen woke me from my hidden slumber. When I peeked through the crack in my bedroom door I could see that he was gone and my mother had a brand new black eye. I had known.

I find that trying to explain what I see and sometimes feel can be difficult, if not impossible. I will do my best to try to put it into something understandable to those that are not cursed as I am. First and most important, most living things have the Darkness. I have never actually seen anyone that didn’t have it but in my world I don’t like to deal with absolutes so I say ‘most’ instead of all. It isn’t evil spirits or demons or some crap like that. I don’t think it’s an aura or anything either but the science in this field is, shall we say, very limited. As near as I can tell, it is a combination of the past evil acts committed and some sort of litmus test for the potential of a future act. The Darkness is the life essence that makes up a living being. As a person does, thinks or contributes to negativity in some way it is sort of like smudging your soul. Imagine a bright brass sign being slowly tarnished with every touch. It isn’t a perfect metaphor but I think you understand.

The problem with this is that makes it seem almost too simple, too easy. Some people can be extremely pure of heart and even a minor negative deed can make the darkness ripple across them like a large rock thrown into still water. While another person who has spent the majority of their life being nothing but a dirtbag, may commit the exact same act without so much a wave of regret. Shadows of that kind are only the darkest of souls and I will go far out of my way to avoid these shadows of humankind. In my world there are a surprising number of them walking around.

That dovetails nicely into describing how it is that I see the world around me. The effect I see is the same in all people, the colors and intensities tend to vary greatly but the overall visual is the same. Imagine a large pool of silver-black mercury. A huge pool of it so large it will surround an entire person. You lay a person on the pool so gently that it doesn’t break the surface tension. They rest on it like a bed but right at the edge where their body meets the mercury there is a slight curl, a distortion if you will. Now imagine this flowing all around a person. It varies in color from one person to the next. The drunkard I spoke of earlier was a deep smoky black while my mother’s was a dusky gray.

I have come across some pretty nasty people in my time and the shadows can get downright dark and if their emotional state is erratic enough the emotions can shoot across their Darkness like lightning, and it’s just as unpredictable. That is pretty much why I started calling it the Darkness. In my line of work I have yet to see anyone that hasn’t been tarnished by the harsh world around us. Simply existing exposes a person to evil acts either by their own actions or by those thrust upon them.

For the most part I have kept this little curse to myself throughout my entire life, never telling many about it, and instantly regretting the few times I did mention anything. At first it wasn’t because I thought I was different, it was the opposite of that actually. I thought I was normal and how I saw the world was how everyone else did too. Imagine if you saw all the grass in the world as blue with red spots instead of bland green. A person simply doesn’t have a lot of occasions to say, ‘Wow, look at that blue grass’ or ‘The spots are really red today’. It seems like you would comment to someone, but how often do you?

With as much as I moved around as a child, making friends was never a real strong suit for me. I never really had an abundance of people to share my thoughts with anyway. In fact, I can count the number of close friends I have had my entire life on one hand. Not having many friends as a child is something you carry with you into adulthood.

I recall a time, it must have been somewhere around the third grade, when I was out on the ball field with my friend Johnny. He had made some random comment, something along the lines of one of the girls liking me. We were at the age where having girls like you was still considered a bad thing and not something we were supposed to want. We had just started chasing girls; we had no clue what do if we ever caught them.

I remember Johnny and I were sitting on the jungle-jim talking about random things. I caught sight of her and watched as she walked across the soccer field. She had long curly red hair and always wore these old country style dresses with the puffy shoulders. She reminded me of some girl from a Western novel that would carry her books to school and stop by the well on the way home to get water for dinner. To say she was my first crush was an understatement. I was as much in love with her as a first grader could possibly be. I would just stare at her and wonder what she would be like to talk to. Not that I could ever muster the courage to talk to a girl mind you. I liked her because her shadow was nearly transparent, a beautiful smoky silver-gray with the occasional flash of white at the edge, flashes of light-blues as she walked and talked with her friends. Her smile would radiate all the way through that white shadow in ripples of honest joy.

Leaning over to Johnny and stating this out loud did not produce the conversation I had thought it would. Instead, I was faced with open laughing and mocking words from someone I thought was a friend. This incident turned out to be my indoctrination into a lifelong road filled with sour relationships and unhealthy friendships. I have kept things to myself ever since that day and we all know that the first step to a really unhealthy relationship is to lie.

You might be asking yourself if my mother or father had the gift. I can really only speak for my mother. She didn’t. In fact, she more likely than not had the exact opposite of my ability. She couldn’t read my mood if I held a neon sign over my head clearly stating what my current mood was. Hers was a very closed world with limited views that rarely even touched the borders of reality. As far as my father goes, I only asked once about him and found nothing more than regret.

I must have been about thirteen or fourteen when I really started to wonder. I was starting to go through all the standard changes all boys do and I could find out all about those from books. What I couldn’t find were the explanations for how my little curse was changing. I began to not just see the Darkness, but there were times when I could smell them too. Usually only very strong emotions but they had definite smells. I really needed to find someone that understood what was happening and I held out hope that the curse was passed down through my father.

One Saturday afternoon when my mother was desperately trying to find a single cigarette somewhere in the couch cushions I decided it was a good time to ask her who my father was. She didn’t know. She didn’t have even the foggiest idea who he might be. She added several other obscure possibilities over the years but I decided to settle on the most often told tale to be fact. She was pretty sure it was some guy from the Navy that she had met while at some random music festival. She wasn’t even sure of the city I was conceived in. She thought it might be San Diego or Virginia, but it could very well have been Denver also. I asked if the Navy had a big presence in Denver and she wanted to know why I would ask her about the Navy. With that, the thought of ever finding out anything about my father was soundly and thoroughly crushed.

Having finally realized that I was alone in the world was a very dark day for me.

Anyway, enough about what has happened in the past, I can’t change it. I think I’m a good person, albeit kind of a downer, but good person overall. My past made me who I am, so I can’t rightly complain too much about it. This is the present, today, the here and now. The bridges burned have long since stopped smoldering and the road ahead is paved with uncertainty and the usual fear of all things living.

As I said, all people have it. Well, all living people. I see Darkness everywhere. I can’t go to the store to buy milk and not see people with their shadow curling and twisting around them. My world can be an extremely depressing place to live in. I find very little hope. Almost nothing I can find makes me think there is a future for me in this dark place. My days start before the sun comes up, trudging off to a job I hate but it helps put food on the table and a little extra away in the bank. I fight my way home with thousands of other people just trying to make ends meet. I kiss my wife when I get home but the tension between us is borderline tangible.

She has a shadow too. Everyone does. I know this because I see them, and I hate it.

Next Chapter: Chapter One