Black Evening

by David Morrell

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A thrilling and suspenseful short story collection from bestselling and award-winning author David Morrell. David Morrell, whose many bestsellers include Double Image, Extreme Denial, and The Brotherhood of the Rose, has consistently redefined the modern thriller. Now he turns to a darker side of suspense in a powerful collection of tales, many of them award winners, that delve into the weird, uncanny terrors that lurk just beneath the comforting surfaces of daily life. Fear of loss, fear of pain, fear of madness, fear of being trapped, fear of the inescapable, unspeakable horrors that fester deep within the soul.... No matter who or where you are, fear is always with you, always ready to attack from behind the masks of thought and dream. Let David Morrell tell you a story...

Release date: February 1, 2000

Publisher: Warner Books

Print pages: 480

Sample

REREADING THE STORIES IN THIS COLLECTION, I WASN’T prepared for the flood of powerful memories they evoked. I suddenly recalled the circumstances under which each was written—where
I was living, what I was feeling, why I was motivated to compose each tale. Those emotion-filled memories extend back more
than thirty years, and yet it seems like only last week that I was a graduate student in American literature at Pennsylvania
State University.


The year was 1967. I was twenty-four, about to complete my master’s degree, anticipating course work for my Ph.D., but unable
to ignore a compulsion that had gripped me since high school: to be a fiction writer. Penn State’s English department had
recently hired a noted science-fiction writer, Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), to teach composition. He was
the first professional writer I’d met, and with the innocent brazenness
of youth, I asked him for personal instruction. He answered politely that his schedule was already full to bursting and that
if I wanted to be his student, I should sign on for a course. I explained that I felt I would benefit more from one-on-one
discussions. He responded that certainly every student would benefit from that approach but that, unfortunately, there wasn’t
time. Sensing that I would persist, he told me that if I gave him a story each week, he might reconsider. For how many weeks?
I asked. For as long as necessary, he replied.


Obviously, Klass was trying to discourage me. A story each week, in addition to my considerable course load, would be burdensome.
The odds were, he clearly thought, that I would soon get tired and give up. After all, even if I did deliver a story a week (and for heaven knew how long), there still wasn’t any guarantee that he would teach me. He had only
promised to reconsider my request.


But my mother hadn’t raised a quitter, and I kept at it. Finally, after having submitted a story a week for six weeks, I was
heartened to receive a note in which Klass invited me to his office. This is it, I thought. My big chance. He’ll tell me he
liked my stories, and he’ll arrange to have them published. To my dismay, the stories weren’t satisfactory. He told me to stop bothering him.


“Your subject matter isn’t special enough,” Klass explained. “All successful writers have a distinctive, compelling approach,
a particular worldview that makes them unique. Look inside yourself. Find out who you are, find out what you’re most afraid
of. That will be your subject
for your life, or until your fear changes. But I don’t mean fear of heights or water or fire,” he continued. “Those are the
superficial symptoms of much deeper fears. Your true fear is like a ferret darting within the tunnels of your psyche, desperate
not to be discovered.”


I did my best to nod wisely. “I think I understand.”

“Good.”

But I didn’t understand. Confused, I went off and did exactly what Klass had warned me not to do: I wrote stories about fear of heights
and water and fire. To my credit, this new batch of stories didn’t fool me. I knew they lacked something, that they didn’t
have the spark of inspiration that separates ordinary stories from memorable ones. Nonetheless, I persisted. And persisted.


And suddenly felt something give way in me. My willpower finally snapped. After all, writing is an act of faith. And if you
lose faith in yourself, if insecurity makes you realize just how unnatural it is to sit scribbling all alone, to sacrifice
time with your wife and daughter, to give up your few moments of leisure, to gamble against the unlikely odds that you will
be one of the very few (only about two hundred) fiction writers in the United States who are able to support themselves by
writing … well, you run out of hope.


I found myself wishing I was somewhere else. Years before, there had been an iron mine outside State College, where Penn State
is located. Known as the Barrens, it was a large open pit that had been abandoned after a dynamite blast released an underground
lake. On occasion, I went there to hike, and now, discouraged with my writing efforts, I decided that a walk there would clear

my head. It was a blazing August afternoon. The forest was dense and humid, drooping in the summer heat, closing in on me,
and as I walked along the narrow trail, careful of snakes that might be in the underbrush, I heard a sound behind me—the snap
of a branch. A squirrel leaping from tree to tree, I thought. I kept going, wiping the sweat from my brow, when I heard another
branch snap and the crunch of what sounded like a footstep on dead leaves.


Someone else was in the forest, I realized. Someone else was out for a hike, looking for relaxation. So I continued along
the narrow trail, and the next time I heard a branch snap and a footstep crunch on dead leaves, a cold spot surfaced between
my shoulder blades. The primal reaction seized me without warning. It was inexplicable. I had an abrupt premonition that whoever
was in the forest meant to harm me. This irrational apprehension grew in strength as I heard yet another snap, another crunch,
something coming closer. No matter how hard I strained to peer behind me, I saw no movement in the forest.


I walked faster along the trail. To my relief, the sounds behind me stopped. I breathed easier, only to stop breathing altogether
as I heard the approaching snap and crunch begin again, but this time in front of me. I froze, paralyzed for a moment, until
adrenaline gave me motion. I backed up, then froze again as I heard someone behind me. I turned in a circle, on guard against
every flank.


And blinked in surprise when I found a desk and a typewriter before me. The intense, vivid, visceral experience had been a
daydream. I had so disappeared into my
psyche that I had lost touch with my surroundings. Imagination had become more real than reality. Nothing like this had ever
happened to me before. It made me remember what Klass had said: “Your true fear is like a ferret darting within the tunnels
of your psyche, desperate not to be discovered.”


But sometimes it might be possible to get close to it, I realized. The daydream had certainly scared me. What was it about?
What would happen next? The urge to know the outcome made me realize how much my earlier stories had lacked forward motion,
suspense, a fresh vision. I didn’t know any fictional situation like the one I had just imagined. James Dickey’s Deliverance would be published three years later. That 1970 novel about terror on a backwoods canoe trip amazed readers with its new
approach to describing fear. But in 1967, before Deliverance, I felt on my own. By surrendering to my problem of how to be a fiction writer, I had, in Zen fashion, allowed my problem
to solve itself.


Feeling vitalized, I immediately set to work to write a story about my experience so that I could find out what happened next.
I called it “The Plinker,” referring to a man who goes off one morning to do some target shooting (the slang term is plinking) and discovers that someone else is in the woods, someone interested in a different kind of target shooting. The story was
written long before serial killers and stalkers became popular subjects of fiction, and when I showed it to Philip Klass,
he must have sensed my excitement, because he read it much sooner than he had the others I had given him. He phoned and invited
me to join him at a coffeehouse at 4:00 P.M., and
thus began one of the most unique afternoons, evenings, and nights of my life.


First, Klass told me he was amazed that I had written a story so different from the others, one that had strongly engaged
his attention. Then he asked if I’d been reading Geoffrey Household. I shook my head no. “Geoffrey who?” I asked. “The British
suspense writer,” Klass answered. Household’s two most famous novels were Rogue Male (1939) and Watcher in the Shadows (1960), the former about a British big-game hunter who stalks Hitler on the eve of World War II. Later, when I read Household’s
work, I did recognize a kinship. Household’s fiction is best when it deals with threats from unknown forces. The more frightened
and vulnerable the heroes were, the more I identified with them. That ferret in my psyche again.


My ignorance about Geoffrey Household revealed another limitation, I hadn’t read any suspense fiction or popular literature
of any kind. As a teenager, I had been motivated to write because of my fascination with Stirling Silliphant’s scripts for
the 1960-1964 television show Route 66, in which two young men drove across the United States in a Corvette, searching for America and themselves. Silliphant combined
action with ideas. But my desire to emulate him had led me more toward ideas than action. After years of studying literature
in college, I had become so saturated with Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and other classic authors that my fiction felt stale
and imitative, literary in the worst sense of the word. But not anymore. I remembered the thrilling contemporary feel of Route 66 and why I had wanted to be a writer
in the first place. I resolved to read as many contemporary novels, popular novels, as I could, beginning with Household—because if I was going to write action stories with a difference, I realized
that I’d better find out what the best action writers had already done so that I wouldn’t repeat what they’d accomplished.


At the coffeehouse, Klass and I discussed these issues and were surprised to discover later that three hours had passed. I
was due home for dinner, but Klass invited me to go to his apartment, meet his wife, and continue the discussion. After months
of trying to get Klass’s attention, I felt my heart leap at the invitation. Quickly I phoned my wife and explained the situation.
Klass and I went to his apartment, where our discussion became deeper and more intense.


“The best fiction,” Klass said, “comes from a writer’s compulsion to communicate traumatic personal events. Often the writer
so represses those events that he or she isn’t aware of the source of the compulsion. But whether consciously done or not,
this self-psychoanalysis makes a writer’s work unique—because the psychological effects of trauma are unique to each person.
You can tell the bad writers from the good writers because bad writers are motivated by money and ego, whereas good writers
practice their craft for the insistent reason that they must be writers, that they have no choice, that something inside them—the ferret—gnaws at their imaginations and the festering
pressure has to be released. Often daydreams are a signal of those pressures,” Klass said. “They’re spontaneous messages from
the subconscious, subliminal hints about stories that want to be told.”



What were my own festering pressures? My fiction would reveal them, Klass said, and it has. In retrospect, I’m amazed by the
disguised revelations in what I’ve written: that my father died shortly after I was born, that he was killed in World War
II, that I grew up with a morbid fear of war, that economic necessity forced my mother to put me in an orphanage for a time,
that I could never be sure whether the woman who reclaimed me was the same person who had given me up, that I persistently
felt the lack of a father figure, that my fear of violence eventually prompted me to confront my fear by joining a street
gang…. I could go on, but it isn’t wise to face traumas directly. Otherwise, I might lose the compulsion to write about them.


These were the sorts of things that Klass and I talked about in his apartment. Again, time sped by, and we were surprised
to discover that it was now 10:00 P.M. Klass’s engaging wife, Fruma, had participated in the discussion. Now she invited me to stay for a late dinner. Until midnight,
the three of us ate pot roast and talked. Then we cleared the dishes, and Klass spread the pages of my story on the dining
room table. He analyzed every sentence for me, explaining why this technique worked but that one didn’t, showing me new ways
to accomplish a scene, giving me pointers about dialogue, about structure, discussing pace, teaching me how to make description
feel like action.


At last, he reached the final sentence on the final page, summed up his remarks, handed me the story, and said, “That’s all.
That’s the limit of what I’m going to teach you.” Through the window behind him, the night
was turning gray. Birds began to sing. Dawn was approaching. Spellbound by Klass’s wisdom, I had lost track of time. Now that
the session was over, I was exhausted. But after thanking him and starting home, despite my fatigue, I felt buoyed by an excitement
that seemed to lift me off the sidewalk. The memory is vivid to me: the night I became convinced that I would be a writer.


What happened to “The Plinker"? It was never published. The magazines to which I submitted it found it too graphic (although
it wouldn’t be today). I tried for a year. One magazine kept it so long, I had hopes, but one day the story was returned to
me—wrinkled, dog-eared, coffee-stained—with a note informing me that the magazine was going out of business and someone had
found my manuscript stuffed in a drawer. Undaunted, I eventually put the pages away, because my attention had become fixated
on another story—a novel, actually. It was about a Special Forces Vietnam veteran who engages in a deadly duel with a small-town
police chief, a Marine Corps veteran from Korea. The plot was about the generation gap, about the difference between Korea
and Vietnam, about hawks and doves and mental programming. I called it First Blood. It was dedicated to Philip Klass and his pen name, William Tenn, “each in his own way,” because the generous teacher and
the gifted fiction writer, both the same person, had helped me. I sent the novel to Geoffrey Household. He wrote a kind letter
back to me, telling me that the action was too strong.


“The Plinker” doesn’t appear in this collection. As important as the story is to me, I find it unsatisfying
now—the work of an apprentice. Some readers might even mistakenly conclude that it is derivative of Deliverance rather than a predecessor of it. Protective of it, I keep it to myself. But the stories that are included here, presented in order of composition, seem to me to have aged well. Tales of dark suspense, their approach is
different from that of my international thrillers. You won’t find spies and round-the-globe intrigue here. What you will find are the stark emotions behind that intrigue: fear and trembling. The ferret keeps scurrying in my psyche. Some of its
tracks lie on these pages.



“The Dripping” was my first published story and, as such, despite its horrifying content, has great sentimental value for me.
I had started writing First Blood at Penn State in 1968, but graduate courses, student teaching, and my dissertation on John Barth slowed the novel’s progress.
It was slowed even more after I graduated and moved to Iowa City, where most of my time was filled with teaching, course preparation,
student conferences, faculty meetings, and my other responsibilities as an assistant professor of American literature at the
University of Iowa. I finally completed the novel in the summer of 1971. Instead of feeling exhausted, however, I was bursting
with energy and immediately began the story you are about to read It is one of the few that occurred to me, complete, in a
dream. When I wakened, I rushed to a typewriter and wrote it in one sitting.


THAT AUTUMN, WE LIVE IN A HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY, my mother’s house, the house I was raised in. I have been to the village, struck even more by how nothing in it has changed,
yet everything has, because I am older now, seeing it differently. I feel as though I am both here now and back then, at once
with the mind of a boy and a man. It is so strange a doubling, so intense, so unsettling, that I am moved to work again, to
try to paint it, studying the hardware store, the grain barrels in front, the twin square pillars holding up the drooping
balcony onto which seared, wax-faced men and women from the old people’s hotel above come to sit and rock and watch. They
look like the same aging people I saw as a boy, the wood of the pillars and balcony as splintered.


Forgetful of the hours while I work, I do not begin the long walk home until late, at dusk. The day has been warm, but now
in my shirt I am cold, and a half mile along I am caught in a sudden shower, forced to leave the gravel road for the shelter
of a tree, its leaves already brown and yellow. The rain becomes a storm, streaking at me sideways, drenching me. I cinch
the neck of my canvas bag to protect my painting and equipment and decide to run. My socks are spongy in my shoes, repulsive,
when at last I reach the lane down to the house and barn.


The house and barn. They and my mother alone have changed, as if as one, warping, weathering, their joints twisted and strained,
their gray so unlike the brightness I recall as a boy. The place is weakening her. She is in tune with it. She matches its
decay. That is why we have come here to live. To revive. Once I thought I could convince
her to move away. But of her sixty-five years, she has spent forty here, and she insists that she will spend the rest, what
is left to her.


The rain falls stronger as I hurry past the side of the house, the light on in the kitchen, suppertime and I am late. The
house is connected to the barn the way the small base of an L is connected to its stem. The entrance I have always used is directly at the joining, and when I enter, out of breath, my
clothes cling to me cold and wet. The door to the barn is to my left, the door to the kitchen straight ahead. I hear the dripping
in the basement, down the stairs to my right.


“Meg. Sorry I’m late,” I call to my wife, setting down my water-beaded canvas sack, opening the kitchen door. There is no
one. No settings on the table. Nothing on the stove. Only the yellow light from the sixty-watt bulb in the ceiling, the kind
my mother prefers to the brightness of a one-hundred-watt. It reminds her of candlelight, she says.


“Meg,” I call again, and still no one answers. They’re asleep, I think. With dusk coming on, the dark clouds of the storm
have lulled them, and they have lain down for a nap, expecting to wake before I return.


Still the dripping. Although the house is very old, the barn long disused, the roofs crumbling, I have not thought it all
so ill-maintained, the storm so strong that water can be seeping past the cellar windows, trickling, pattering on the old
stone floor. I switch on the light to the basement, descend the wooden stairs to the right, worn and squeaking, reach where
the stairs turn to the left the rest of the way down to the floor, and see not water dripping,
but milk. Milk everywhere. On the rafters, on the walls, dripping on the film of milk on the stones, gathering, speckled with
dirt, in the channels between them. From side to side and everywhere.


Sarah, my child, has done this, I think. She has been fascinated by the big wooden dollhouse that my father made for me when
I was young, its blue paint chipped and peeling now. She has pulled it from the far corner to the middle of the basement.
There are games and toy soldiers and blocks that have been taken from the wicker storage chest and played with on the floor,
all covered with milk, the dollhouse, the chest, the scattered toys, milk dripping on them from the rafters, milk trickling
on them.


Why has she done this? I think. Where can she have gotten so much milk? What was in her mind to do this thing?

“Sarah,” I call. “Meg.” Angry now, I mount the stairs to the quiet kitchen. “Sarah,” I shout. She will clean the mess and
stay indoors the remainder of the week.


I cross the kitchen, turn through the sitting room, past the padded flower-patterned chairs and sofa that have faded since
I knew them as a boy, past several of my paintings that my mother has hung on the wall, brightly colored old ones of pastures
and woods from when I was in grade school, brown-shaded new ones of the town, tinted as if old photographs. Two stairs at
a time up to the bedrooms, my wet shoes on the soft, worn carpet on the stairs, my hand streaking on the smooth, polished
maple banister.


At the top, I swing down the hall. The door to Sarah’s
room is open. It is dark in there. I switch on the light. She is not on the bed, nor has she been. The satin spread is unrumpled,
the rain pelting in through the open window, the wind fresh and cool. I have a bad feeling then and go uneasily into our bedroom.
It is dark as well, empty. My stomach has become hollow. Where are they? All in my mother’s room?


No. As I stand at the open door to my mother’s room, I see from the yellow light that I turned on in the hall that only she
is in there, her small torso stretched across the bed.


“Mother,” I say, intending to add, “Where are Meg and Sarah?” But I stop before I do. One of my mother’s shoes is off, the
other askew on her foot. There is mud on the shoes. There is blood on her cotton dress. It is torn, her brittle hair disrupted,
blood on her face. Her bruised lips are swollen.


For several moments, I am silent with shock. “My God, Mother,” I finally manage to say, and as if the words are a spring releasing
me to action, I touch her to wake her. But I see that her eyes are open, staring toward the ceiling, unseeing although alive,
and each breath is a sudden full gasp, then a slow exhalation.


“Mother, what has happened? Who did this to you? Where are Meg and Sarah?”

But she does not look at me, only toward the ceiling.

“For God sake, Mother, answer me! Look at me! What has happened?”

Nothing. Her eyes are sightless. Between gasps, she is like a statue.




What I think is hysterical. Disjointed, contradictory. I must find Meg and Sarah. They must be somewhere, beaten like my mother.
Or worse. Find them. Where? But I cannot leave my mother. When she becomes alert again, she, too, will be hysterical, frightened,
in great pain. How did she end up on the bed?


In her room, there is no sign of the struggle she must have put up against her attacker. It must have happened somewhere else.
She crawled from there to here. Then I see the blood on the floor, the swath of blood down the hall from the stairs. Who did
this? Where is he? Who would beat a gray, wrinkled arthritic old woman? Why in God’s name would he do it? I imagine the pain
of the arthritis as she struggled with him.


Perhaps he is still in the house, waiting for me.

To the hollow sickness in my stomach now comes fear, hot, pulsing, and I am frantic before I realize what I am doing, grabbing
the spare cane that my mother always keeps by her bed, flicking on the light in her room, throwing open the closet door and
striking in with the cane. Viciously, sounds coming from my throat, I flail the cane among faded dresses.


No one. Under the bed. No one. Behind the door. No one.

I search all the upstairs rooms that way, terrified, constantly checking behind me, clutching the cane and whacking into closets,
under beds, behind doors with a force that would certainly crack a skull. No one.


“Meg! Sarah!”

No answer, not even an echo in this sound-absorbing house.


There is no attic, just an overhead entry to a crawl space under the eaves, and that has long been sealed. No sign of tampering.
No one has gone up.


I rush down the stairs, seeing the trail of blood my mother has left on the carpet, imagining her pain as she crawled. I search
the rooms downstairs with the same desperate thoroughness. In the front closet. Behind the sofa and chairs. Behind the drapes.


No one.

I lock the front door, lest he be outside in the storm, waiting to come in behind me. I remember to draw every blind, close
every drape, lest he be out there peering at me. The rain pelts insistently against the windows.


I cry out again and again for Meg and Sarah. The police. My mother. A doctor. I grab for the old phone on the wall by the
front stairs, fearful to listen to it, afraid he has cut the line outside. But it is droning. Droning. I ring for the police,
working the handle at the side around and around and around.


They are coming, they say. A doctor with them. Stay where I am, they say. But I cannot. Meg and Sarah. I must find them. I
know they are not in the basement, where the milk is dripping—all the basement is open to view. Except for my childhood things,
we cleared out all the boxes and barrels and shelves of jars the Saturday before.


But under the stairs. I have forgotten about under the stairs, and now I race down and stand, dreading, in the milk, but there
are only cobwebs there, already re-formed
from Saturday, when we cleared them. I look up at the side door I first came through, and as if I am seeing through a telescope,
I focus on the handle. It seems to fidget. I have a panicked vision of the intruder bursting through, and I charge up to lock
it, and the door to the barn.


And then I think, If Meg and Sarah are not in the house, they are likely in the barn. But I cannot bring myself to unlock
the barn door and go through. He must be there, as well. Not in the rain outside, but in the shelter of the barn, and there are no lights to turn on there.


And why the milk? Did he do it, and where did he get it? And why? Or did Sarah do it before? No, the milk is too fresh. It
has been thrown there too recently. By him. But why? And who is he? A tramp? An escapee from some prison? Or asylum? No, the
nearest institution is far away, at least a hundred miles. From the town then. Or a nearby farm.


I know my questions are a delaying tactic, to keep me from entering the barn. But I must. I take the flashlight from the kitchen
drawer and unlock the door to the barn, forcing myself to go in quickly, cane ready, flashing my light. The stalls are still
there, listing—and some of the equipment—churners, separators—dull and rusted, cobwebbed and dirty. The must of decaying wood
and crumbled hay, the fresh wet smell of the rain gusting through cracks in the walls.


Flicking my light toward the corners, edging toward the stalls, hearing boards creak, I try to control my fright. I remember
when I was a boy how the cattle waited in the
stalls for my father to milk them, how the barn was once board-tight and solid, warm to be in, how there was no connecting
door from the barn to the house because my father did not want my mother to smell the animals when she was cooking.


I scan my light along the walls, sweep it in arcs through the darkness before me as I draw nearer to the stalls, and in spite
of myself, I recall that other autumn when the snow came early, deep drifts by morning and still storming thickly, how my
father went out to the barn to do the milking and never returned for lunch, or supper. The phone lines were down, no way to
get help, and my mother and I waited all night, unable to make our way through the storm, listening to the slowly dying wind.
The next morning was clear and bright and blinding as we waded out, finding the cows in agony in their stalls from not having
been milked and my father dead, frozen rock-solid in the snow in the middle of the next field, where he must have wandered
when he lost his bearings in the storm.


There was a fox nosing at him under the snow, and my father’s face was so mutilated that he had to be sealed in his coffin
before he could lie in state. Days aft