Barry Longyear - Dark Corners

This book is a work of fiction, and the incidents and characters are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual

persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is coincidental.

reproduced in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the

publisher. Story-specific copyright information can be found in theAcknowledgements section of this

book.

ISBN: 1-931305-05-6

Scorpius Digital Publishing

PO Box 19423

Queen Anne Station

Seattle, WA 98109

www.scorpiusdigital.com

Cover painting by Paul Clift

Cover design by Bridget McKenna

D A R K C O R N E R S

Barry B. Longyear

To

Harlan Ellison

“Vini vidi nates calce concidi.”

First…

Dark Corners.

I was young, perhaps six or seven, in a room the size of a small bedroom. Something — some horror

that I knew — would be coming soon to get me, to destroy me. I wasn’t strong enough to defeat it and I

wasn’t swift enough to outrun it. I knew this. Besides, I knew that if I tried either, the horror would hurt

me all the more.

Listening, I couldn’t hear anything moving in the hall outside. My heart was beating so painfully hard, I

could hear nothing else. I wiped my palms on my upper sleeves, my breaths coming shallow and rapid,

my entire body trembling.

It was coming.

The horror was coming, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

In a panic I moved to the door and made certain it was latched and locked. That taken care of, I

examined the door. It was paneled, painted white, and very old. One panel was visibly loose, and I could

see how loose the hinge on the top was. The door didn’t look sturdy enough to withstand any kind of

onslaught, and the thing that was after me would come like an avalanche.

I moved a heavy dresser in front of the door. I pushed a foot locker in front of the dresser, and then

began piling chairs, bookshelves, and anything I could carry and put it on top of the dresser and

footlocker. At last, with everything in the room in front of the door, I allowed myself a breath.

I stood there, still shaking, and braced myself against the furniture, thinking that I might have a chance. It

couldn’t get through everything I had piled against the door. Even if it could, I would be going down

fighting, not curled up in a corner whimpering.

My breathing slowed and my heart ceased its wretched pounding. Whatever it was out there, I was safe

behind the fort I had constructed.

And then

I looked

ever so slowly

to my left

and saw

one entire wall of the room was missing!

The room was open to the hallway!

I screamed.

I heard it coming for me, and I screamed.

I backed away from the enormous opening, clawed at the wall behind me, and screamed, and screamed,

and screamed until my wife shook me awake.

A dream.

Messages from what Carl Jung called the great guide, friend, and adviser: the unconscious. Grist for the

story mill, as I had told the attendees of countless writer’s workshops. Still, as I lay there in the dark,

waiting for my heart to calm, the dream seemed more message than grist. It was two in the morning and I

didn’t really want to go back to sleep. I got up, put on a sweatshirt, made some neutered coffee, and

stumbled upstairs to my office to write it out.

What was my friend the unconscious trying to tell me? I began writing down the dream, the fleeting

thoughts that were racing back to their hiding places in my mind were rounded up and dragged to the

paper, and the story that became “Chimaera” was begun. It was through writing that story that I managed

to crack the code and figure out what my dream was trying to tell me. It was this:

There was something lurking in a dark corner of my mind, a memory, a number of memories, that I had

spent a lifetime not seeing because they did not fit into the reality in which I wanted to live. But the

memories were coming, and no matter how hard I tried to deny them, forget them, or disguise them, they

would be heard at last.

And heard they were. Years later their echoes remain. After much work they are becoming a part of me,

but through that work I discovered that the dark corner of my mind which I finally illuminated was only

one of thousands. Each dark corner calls for its own light, and this function is what is served by many of

my stories.

The corners I have explored have shown me laughter, grief, shame, pain, courage, cowardice, fear, and

thousands of different views of myself, others, and this universe in which we live and do our hopeless best

to keep up with the changes. It seems as though we spend our childhoods constructing mental hiding

places for ourselves and for the things we refuse to acknowledge, and then spend the rest of our lives

either being controlled by these dark corners or fighting like the devil to take back our power from them.

From where do these dark corners come? It comes from a process that is as natural as time.

There was once a first grader who was having a birthday party, and all of his classmates were invited to

the party at his home — all but one. Perhaps an invitation got misplaced, perhaps his name was left out

because of a momentary lapse of memory, perhaps he was just not wanted. Whatever the reason, the

boy who was not invited chose not to see that he was not invited.

At the end of the school day, as his excited classmates began climbing on the chartered bus to where the

party would be held, the uninvited boy could not say to the others that he couldn’t go because he wasn’t

invited. He couldn’t allow them to believe that. He couldn’t allow himself to believe that. He followed the

others onto the bus and went to the party. There he told his classmates, the birthday boy, and himself that

he was invited so convincingly that everyone believed him, including himself. There were, presents, party

favors, cake, ice cream, music, a movie, and pretty lights. Everyone was laughing and playing games, and

he laughed and played with the others. He had never before had such a wonderful time.

There was much amusement, though, when the uninvited boy’s mother finally tracked him down and the

truth came out. He wasn’t invited to the party, no arrangements had been made, and the silly boy just

followed everyone else onto the bus. She had been frantic when he wasn’t where he was supposed to be

at the appointed time. The birthday boy’s mother laughed, the classmates laughed, the uninvited boy’s

mother laughed, and the uninvited boy laughed with them.

That is how dark corners come into being. Mind shadows aren’t possible in the absence of some kind of

injury and the denial of that injury. And for every mind shadow that comes into being, one or more

persons pay. The uninvited boy could not bear the pain of being left out. Hence, he adjusted his view of

reality until hewas invited. This adjustment cast a shadow, however, a shadow that kept him from seeing

and therefore feeling, the rejection, the pain, and the humiliation. When he was caught in his reality lie and

everyone, including his mother, was making fun of him, he adjusted reality again, made fun of himself,

kept everyone laughing, and cast yet another shadow. In one evening he added two dark corners both of

which will dog him until the day he dies, causing no end of trouble, unless he does what it takes to bring

those corners into the light.

That was just crashing a first-grader’s birthday party. Can we imagine the distortions of reality and the

depths of the consequent shadows that can make a pedophile or a serial killer? What about one who

undergoes such extreme trauma his or her entire mind is cast in shadows, becoming a protected lump

responding to nothing?

There are secrets we keep from ourselves. They are enigmas created in moments of panic, despair, pain,

confusion, or ignorance designed to either make something understandable or render it so thoroughly

incomprehensible we won’t have to deal with it at all. Each such mystery is a mental virus lurking in a

dark corner from which it fogs the distinctions between reality and illusion. As the years pass, these bugs

shade each moment with strange meanings and dangerous designs. Often, with the passage of enough

time or the arrest of a feeling-numbing compulsion, the virus explodes. Memory returns or the illusion

mutates and takes total control. The outwardly normal being suddenly becomes the logical conclusion of

his or her fantasies and evasions.

Does he grab a rifle and begin executing the patrons of the local fast food franchise? Perhaps she picks

up a knife and mutilates her husband. A young adult might take her own life. A young boy might execute

his entire family. Some just withdraw, becoming nothing. Others get in touch with just enough of the real

world to make living like a human being (for the humans) a matter of possibility.

There are, of course, many kinds of therapy, many of them recognized by the American Psychiatric

Association, most of them not so recognized. Psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, spiritualists,

support groups, aliens, strangers, fortune tellers, magicians, witch doctors, friends, family, and self are all

warriors in this struggle to kill the virus.

A good bit of my therapy comes from writing stories, and this collection contains a few dedicated to my

own particular shadows.Dark Corners is a collection of adventures in minds human and other than

human. Some of the voyages are beautiful, inspiring, some are funny, some are sad, and some are terribly

dangerous and frightening. These are stories of patients, therapists, counselors, gods, and those simply

playing the best hand they can with the cards they were dealt.

Stories to me are little realities in which I have an opportunity to carve out and thereby realize a piece of

myself. My pieces, moreover, are scattered in a thousand distant places. When I discover one in a story

it’s an important kind of validation to have the reader witness the same fragment. It’s healing, perhaps,

but it is also one hell of a roller coaster ride.

If anything, this current collection might be viewed as a chance to sit in on a rather bizarre group therapy

session on this and other planets, in this and other realities. As with all such sessions, the goals are insight,

truth, relief, and thrills.

Have you ever had a sick thought? A corrupt feeling? Have you honestly inventoried your hates, your

loves, your lusts? What was it that created your favorite serial killer? What do you do with your own

rage? What will you do with it tomorrow? What are the chances in taking a voyage through an alien

mind? What are the dangers of trying to understand minds of our own design? What are the perils of

trying to understand ones own mind?

What if you could absorb and become the entirety of another being, adding to yourself, for the first time,

feelings?

What if you could enter and walk your own mind, identifying and confronting the monsters that lie in wait

there?

What if the only help you can give to another is to help him lose his fear of death?

There are other dimensions and they too must have their dangerous mental cases. What if the insane of

our dimension, muttering gibberish to themselves, are actually in communication with the insane of other

dimensions? What if they could exchange more than thoughts?

What if you really could go back? Could you handle it? You couldn’t handle it before. That’s why the

virus is occupying your brain pan instead of reality. What about a chance to start over, but knowing what

you know now?

All intelligent beings we can imagine have mind shadows. The ability to imagine and create is the ability to

choose one’s warp of reality. Gods are intelligent beings. What of their dark corners? What kind of help

can they seek? What does a god use for a god?

Dark corners only exist because we don’t want to know what’s in them. Yet, when we become aware of

a problem through pain or embarrassment, the curiosity to establish the origins occasionally gets the

better of us and we take a chance. It reminds me of all those ancient horror movie clichés. Just at

midnight the couple enters the huge, ramshackle dwelling, the thunder from the lightning storm shaking the

remaining window panes. As the lightning flashes illuminate the murky interior of the house, he turns on a

flashlight and plays the beam over the cobweb hung heart of the dwelling. The dust is thick on the floor

and furniture. There is, however, a strange set of footprints in the dust on the floor. He shines the light on

one and examines it. The foot that made the print was bare, very large, and had unusually long toenails

that disturbed the dust between each print as whatever it was dragged its nails across the floor. Nails —

or claws.

Suddenly there is a noise, the whunk of something heavy and soft falling against something unyielding, like

two hundred pounds of meat against a stone floor. She grabs his arm and shakes his sleeve, causing him

to jump.

“Don’t do that!” he says, pulling his arm free from her grasp.

“Can’t we go now?” she whispers.

“What was that sound?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Please, let’s get out of here.”

He plays the beam of light along the floor, following the footprints, until they disappear beneath the door

to the cellar. The noise comes again.

“It’s coming from down there,” he whispers. A strange pale mist begins coming from beneath the door as

the flashlight goes dark. He smacks the flashlight against his hand and the beam returns. As he goes to the

door, she pulls on his sleeve. “We shouldn’t. Oh, please, let’s leave this place!”

He shushes her as he places his hand on the door latch and pulls up, the latch grating as though it hadn’t

been opened in decades. As he pulls the door open, the ancient hinges scream and the flashlight goes out

again.

He shakes it until the beam returns showing a set of crumbling stone steps leading down into the depths,

trails of tattered cobwebs moving slightly with the dank air. “I wonder what made that noise?” he asks, as

the light dims and then returns. She stands on the tips of her toes and looks over his shoulder.

“Whatis down there?”

C’mon.

Let’s find out.

Then Came the Misty Man

If I don’t write it, I forget it, so I write it. It’s not real writing with a pen and paper. The only paper here

is for the toilets and they never let any of us have anything sharp like a pen. I understand that. Some of

the people in here are crazy. So I write this down on my left palm with an imaginary pen held by my right

hand. I’m doing that right now. It sounds silly, but when I write it down, I remember. When I don’t, I

forget. I have to remember. There is so little left.

Hicks is hitting me again. It’s unfair. No hospital attendant should ever act like that, hitting the patients. It

makes him mad seeing me write these things down. But I have to keep doing it or I’ll forget. Then I’ll

wake up all sore and bruised and not know why.

But it hurts, him hitting me. Sometimes it hurts so much my mind moves through the shadows into other

lands, other worlds, other times and dimensions. It’s really true. I know because I wrote it down on my

hand. One time when Hicks was hitting me, it hurt so bad my mind walked off into the shadows, and

there I met the Misty Man. I called him the Misty Man because I needed to write down something right

away and I’d never seen anything like that before, a thing made of vapors, lights, and shadows. The

Misty Man spoke to me then. He was in the shadows fleeing his own persecutor.

Ohhhhh. Hicks hit me hard that time. Real hard. I’m in for it this time. God, I don’t know why he hates

me so. I’m not like the ones who have to be fed or get their diapers changed. I feed myself, wash myself,

and go to the toilet alone. He should like me best of all. But I’m the one he likes to hit the most.

Maybe it’s because of who I was before the trial. This is, after all, a place for the criminally insane. The

sign on the gate says so. An unthinkable thing. Another unthinkable thing. There is no memory of what I

was supposed to have done because I wrote nothing down. It must have been bad though. Some of the

things they said about me at the trial. I don’t remember what they said. I didn’t write that down. I did

write down that they were bad things—

—kicked me. So hard.

Going away.

Gone.

Now I’ll cry, but just to myself. I can’t ever let Hicks see me cry.

When Hicks hits me in front of the other patients, or the nurses and doctors, he does it like he’s only

joking, kidding around. But the words sting. The slaps hurt. Sometimes he takes my left hand and forces

me to slap my own face.

“You don’t have a pencil,” Hicks explains with a sneer. “We don’t give sharp instruments to nuts. You

don’t have any paper and nothing is written on your palm. Look!” He punches my upper arm. I keep

writing. Hicks grabs my hand and shoves it into my face.

“Look at your palm, Nut! Can you read anything there?” Again he forces me to slap my own face.

“Look at it, you nut! Look!”

He smacks the back of my head with his open hand. Some of the patients in the rec room laugh. Most

don’t. Most have Hickses of their own.

“Look at it!”

I keep writing. I need to remember as much as I can. So much is gone. Like those three dead men and

the dead woman. Don’t remember killing them. That woman and those three men. Don’t even remember

who they were. I was told about the results of the trial, but I don’t remember the trial.

Sometimes I pick at these pieces of memory I have, then the feelings fill me, flattening me with that

burning, deafening, shock wave of rage. I can’t write like that, so I never find out what it is. Better to

leave it alone.

Hicks has stopped slapping my head. I look up to see why. Hicks is chunky with long, stringy dark hair,

a few strands of which come down to his shoulders. His eyebrows turn up at the ends and his nose is

lumpy and bulbous like some sort of mutant potato. He isn’t very big, but it doesn’t matter. The patients

can’t hit back. The last patient who hit back was taken into the storeroom behind the hospital kitchen by

half a dozen orderlies and beaten to death. That’s what they tell us.

Hicks is looking at someone across the room. I look and see her: Nurse Stover. She is shaking her head

and frowning at Hicks. The look says several things. He knows better than to abuse patients in the rec

room. That’s why they have the padded cells: secluded, sound proofed.

Bad form, Hicks, says her look.

All these witnesses.

Bad form.

Nurse Stover yawns and goes back to reading her tabloid, freshening up her fantasy of being abducted

and raped by giant grasshoppers.

I study Nurse Stover, the wisps of unruly black hair on her neck rebelling against the tight bun beneath

her starched white cap.

I couldn’t rape Nurse Stover.

The idea of it repels me.

I might think differently, though, if I were a giant grasshopper.

I could cut her throat. I wonder about that, because the doctor once said that the four victims I was

supposed to have killed had all been butchered. Then, because I never speak, the doctor went back to

making notes.

In my little rubber room for the night. Long ago I wrote that it looks like the upholstered interior of a

really cheap coffin, and that hasn’t changed.

God, I want to know who I am. I want out of here, to be free of Hicks, but to do that I have to

remember my name.

It’s a rule. If I can’t remember my name, I’m crazy and they won’t let me loose. If I tell them my name,

then I’m cured and can be sent back out to do whatever it is that I once did.

If I ever find out what my name is, I will write it down. I must remember to write it down. It’s important.

What was it that took my name and memory?

Was it the Misty Man?

The Misty Man had filled the corner of my cell after that one terrible beating Hicks had given me. It was

like the punishment had excreted the Misty Man into existence by the sheer demand of my pain and

need.

A god?

A ghost?

The projections of an other dimensional alien whose brain waves seeped through the cracks of his own

dimension? That’s what I believe. He was locked up and tortured by his own kind and he reached for me

the same way that I reached for him. Then we met. I saw him in my cell. He saw me in his cell.

What’s there to believe? The doctor had pushed around a pink form. He told me that I had been

overworked, under great stress. Then there was a death. Then there were four more deaths.

According to the doctor.

The issue isn’t communication with aliens, the doctor had said. The issue is getting in touch with reality.

The issue is getting better.

What was it? Numbers, policy, politics, habit, arbitrary rules? I was caught in a bind, assaulted by rubber

stamps, there had been that embarrassment before the Foreign Relations Committee, that dressing down

by the Secretary, and then someone had died.

Someone had died.

Dear, dear someone. Dear, dear one. Are you the one I fear to remember? Are you the one I walk Hell

trying to forget?

Then there were great gaps torn into my memory; then the hospital and Hicks. Then came the Misty

Man. The creature asked me what I wanted to do about it.

“About what?” I asked the thing.

“About life, the planet, the universe, things.” The voice was level, devoid of emotion. There were muted

lights within the mist. The lights were the emotions the mind words couldn’t feel. The Misty Man cared

about me. It cared about what I thought, what I wanted, about the ocean of pain in which I was

drowning.

I was scared. It was the only time I ever thought I was crazy. My need, though, drove me toward the

creature. The Misty Man listened to my pain. It told me how it suffered. It asked me things: How is my

time? There are no days, no nights, in the Misty Man’s reality. Only mass and time.

The Misty Man was isolated from its kind, removed from its body and held in a field that rendered it

powerless in its own dimension. My pain had driven my mind into the Misty Man’s dimension. There I

have the power.

“Through you,” said the Misty Man, “I can have power again. Through me, you can have power again.

We can have power through each other.”

If it is true, there is something I can do about my day, my year, my existence. I can bring back to life

those who should have never died. I can kill those who should have never been born.

“Are these things we can do?” I had asked the Misty Man.

The creature didn’t know. We would have to try out our powers through each other and see.

“You have already slain someone for me,” the Misty Man said. It was a caretaker the shadow hated: the

shadow’s Hicks. “You wanted to kill your caretaker and instead you killed mine. We must have other

ways to serve ourselves by serving each other. Shall I kill your caretaker?”

I didn’t want Hicks killed. Not just right then. But it made me feel strong. It was my choice. Life or death

for Hicks became my choice. He could be brought down with nothing more than my wish.

“You’re repressing the memory of what you’ve done,” says the doctor. “What you did was so

unacceptable to your own moral sense, your mind refuses to admit to it. It’s a very common survival

mechanism. If the past can’t be remembered, it doesn’t exist? If it doesn’t exist, then you didn’t do it. But

to chop out that piece of reality you’ve lost your entire past.”

What he says sounds stupid. I write it down here for the whole world to see. It’s stupid, what the doctor

says.

Everybody knows why I can’t remember. I didn’t write it down.

His office is shabby. He doesn’t even hang up his diplomas and certificates. The way his office looks says

to me that even he doesn’t like it there. Everything looks like it was reclaimed from the Salvation Army

before it could be repaired. Even the doctor looks bald, threadbare, worn out.

All he has left now are eyes.

Eyes and a watch.

Eyes and a watch, and a clock on the wall.

His eyes look at his watch, his mouth makes another bored comment, the eyes look at the clock on the

wall, then aim down again and look at the watch.

“Well, we’re done for today.”

This time the session went for only six minutes. The state pays him for forty-five.

“Shall I melt his legs?” asks the Misty Man.

I giggle and the doctor opens the door to allow me and the Misty Man to exit.

I have to get this down fast.

It’s night.

Hicks’s voice in the hall woke me up.

I hear him talking outside the door.

The orderly named Boyle answers. They talk angrily about a football game: who should be congratulated,

who should die, who should be cast down into Obscure Hell as gross incompetents, as though they were

authorities on incompetence.

Actually, they are.

Boyle is Danny’s orderly. Boyle is a body builder with a big belly. Danny is a writer who spends his time

thinking of ways to kill Boyle and a book editor named Herb Liselli. Danny will kill Boyle tomorrow.

Danny always says that. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes. I think he’s afraid if he

kills Boyle, the other orderlies will gang up and kill him. Danny’s crazy though. That’s why he’s locked

up in a room like mine. He’s a writer.

He has a good plan, even so. His plan to kill Boyle is very good, but he made me promise not to write it

down. He’s afraid Hicks will read it and tell Boyle. I didn’t write it down, so I don’t remember the plan,

but Danny promised to tell me again right after he kills Boyle. He told me that once he kills Boyle, he’ll go

after Herb Liselli. Once Liselli is dead, Danny doesn’t care what happens. Then I can use the plan.

Boyle swears and his words fade as he moves away from the door. They have decided who the stupid

football players are and now Hicks is looking at me through the peephole. I keep writing down

everything on my palm even though I know it makes him furious. I don’t do it to make him angry,

although I don’t think Hicks believes that.

The door latch clicks.

The smell of the food.

It’s food time and I didn’t even know. The smell. I’m hungry. The smell makes my mouth water.

Hicks pushes open the door with his ass and says, “Lunch time, Nut. Put your imaginary pencil and pad

away and pay attention.”

I don’t.

I keep writing.

He pushes me back, pulls me to my feet, and forces a big spoonful of something into my mouth. I want to

feed myself. I can do it. And I am hungry.

He digs the edge of the spoon into my upper pallet, making me cry out. He did it on purpose. I see the

look in his eyes.

I gag on it. The something that was on the spoon is like a thousand tiny bugs in my mouth. I’m sure it

Barry Longyear - Dark Corners

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