Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene Read Free Book Online Page B

nearby towns or even a barely audible transmission letting us know that things were all right andthat everything would be fine. I pressed the scan button and it ran through the FM frequencies twice, but there was nothing. No static, no ghost broadcasts, no weird noises of feedback. No sound of any kind. Then I tried the AM band but just got more of the same. I switched it over to the satellite radio, which we’d had installed in the car with our last income tax return check, but the satellite bands were also silent.
    “Dead air,” I joked, but nobody laughed.
    I flipped on the CD player and Vertigo Sun filled the car.
    It was the only sun we had.
    We drove into the darkness.

C HAPTER S IX
    The darkness on the edge of town was different from the darkness around it.
    That was the first thing we noticed. We’d seen hints of that before, when we were standing in town and looking toward the horizon. It became more noticeable as we approached, and once we were actually there, the difference became unsettlingly apparent.
    We drove through town, crossed over Route 60 and reached the outskirts of Walden, stopping in front of the big sign on Route 711. The side of the sign that proudly proclaimed You Are Now Entering Walden, Population 11,873 , faced into the darkness. The side facing us said, You Are Now Leaving Walden. Please Come Back Soon . The words seemed to hang in the air, as if the sign were calling out to those who had already entered the darkness.
    Please come back soon…
    But we hadn’t left. We were still there.
    I checked the fuel gauge. We had half a tank. I pulled onto the side of the road and put the car in park. Then I considered our options. No way was I turning the headlights off. We needed them. But while I needed to conserve gas, I was hesitant to leave the lights on withoutthe motor running. If the battery died, we were in for a long walk home, and under these conditions, wasting fuel was preferable to shuffling through the shadows. I decided to leave the engine running. As an afterthought, I turned the music off. I figured we didn’t need that distracting us while we investigated.
    After I opened the door and got out of the Pontiac, Russ and Christy did the same. We shut the doors quietly and moved slowly. The air felt heavy. Oppressive, like before a summer storm. I’d parked the car so that the headlights were pointed into the darkness beyond the sign, but it didn’t do much good. It was like the beams were hitting a wall. Just beyond the road sign, the blackness swallowed them up.
    It’s hard to describe something that’s not describable, but fuck it—I’ll give it a shot. Imagine that you’re sitting in a dark room at night with no lights or candles or anything else for a source of light. Imagine that there’s darkness all around you. Total and complete darkness. Okay? Now imagine that just beyond that darkness is a different kind of darkness, blacker than the rest of the darkness around you. It seems to have substance, even though you know it doesn’t. It’s like tar or India ink. It ripples when you look at it out of the corner of your eye, or maybe it seems to shimmer. You can see the change with your naked eye—the razor line where mere gloom changes into obsidian.
    That’s what it was like, standing there in the middle of the road.
    “Jesus…” Christy’s whisper seemed to dissipate, as if the darkness were swallowing sound like it did the headlights.
    Russ clicked on his flashlight, shined it into the impenetrableblackness, and stepped forward. I grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
    “Don’t go near it.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it’s wrong. Don’t you feel it?”
    Russ stared at me for a moment without responding, then shrugged me off and turned back to the curtain’s edge. He moved the flashlight around, directing the beam at different angles into the gloom. Finally, he spoke.
    “This is some fucking weird shit, guys.”
    Christy and I nodded in agreement. I was