Dance Into the Dark: A Living in the Shadows Novel

Dance Into the Dark: A Living in the Shadows Novel

  By August Westman

  Copyright 2012 August Westman

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  EPILOGUE

  SNEAK PEEK INTO LIVING IN THE SHADOWS VOL. TWO

  PROLOGUE

  It is interesting to note that, as historians and archeologists discover art and writings from ancient civilizations, there are certain patterns that show up in each civilization’s mythology.

  For example: Chinese, Europeans, and ancient central and south Americans all have art depicting large, winged lizards, most of which could breathe fire. While it is possible that the idea of these creatures were shared between the Chinese and Europeans, there is no historical evidence suggesting that they had done so. Besides that, it is near impossible that they could have shared this idea with, say, the Aztecs, as exploration into the new world didn’t happen until centuries after the first carvings of the Quetzalcoatl. Each culture portrayed these beings differently, ranging in size, shape, and purpose, but the defining physical traits are still, undeniably and bizarrely, too similar to be a coincidence.

  While there are some modern theories for this phenomenon, and no physical evidence suggesting that they existed, it still raises the question: is it possible that dragons were real?

  Another example: every civilization in the Common Era has at one point in their history sustained superstitions that, either through ritual or through improper burial, a corpse can rise from the dead and take the life force of living humans to gain great power.

  Each culture had their own name for these monsters, but as time has progressed society has been satisfied to call them the same thing.

  Vampires.

  Back to top

  CHAPTER ONE

  My family was used to moving – when I was in fourth grade my family had moved three times over the course of the year. I could always tell when we were going to move, too. Mom and dad started talking less and less at dinner, but stayed up late at night talking in the office once they thought my siblings and I had fallen asleep. (Well, we assumed they were talking. The lights were on in the room, but we could never hear their voices, even with our ears jammed up against the crack underneath the door.) Within a couple of weeks we were packing up and getting ready to move. As soon as we had settled in to a new city, the change in my parents was instant: dinner would be cheerful again, my parents would be getting a full eight hours of sleep at night, and life would continue on as it had before. Even though the schools and friends and neighbors were different, we always moved in to a large or densely populated city, mom got a job at a university teaching medieval literature, and dad set up a shop as a carpenter making custom furniture. We’ve lived in New York, Chicago, Miami, San Antonio, Portland, Baltimore, Atlanta, and even Toronto, just to name a few.

  When I was twelve we moved to San Francisco. I instantly fell in love with the city; the art, the music, the wide variety of people I met, even the crazy way all the apartments were painted. There was nothing I didn’t love about the city, and it seemed to me my parents felt the same way. We stayed there for years. I don’t know what was special about San Francisco, but my parents showed no signs of wanting to leave.

  Until a couple of weeks into my junior year of high school. All of the sudden they announced they had found a charming two –story house in a town called Stevens Ridge, Colorado, and that we were moving within two weeks. I was shocked. First of all, they didn’t appear worried or stressed before deciding this at all, and secondly, we had never before lived in any city for longer than a year until settling down in San Francisco. After the second year of living in the City by the Bay I assumed that we had finally found a place to stay for good.

  I couldn’t figure out why they moved us so suddenly. I knew they liked San Francisco – they were these pseudo-modern hippies that believed in natural wellness and yoga and maintaining balance in one’s life, and the city practically oozed that sort of attitude and then some. All they said was that there were good job opportunities for them in Colorado, though I think that’s a load of crap because Mom got a job working at a college finding old or unique books for their library and dad found a place to open his own carpentry shop, which is pretty much exactly what they were doing before the move.

  I was, admittedly, a bit resentful of the fact that we had to move from a place I loved so much. Not only that, but we were moving into a city that had just a fraction of the population of San Francisco, making it the smallest place that we’d ever lived in.

  I was terrified of having to adjust to a small town. Making friends was easy in big cities – everyone in my school lived fairly close together, and each school was big enough to have plenty of people to meet and make friends with. I had nightmarish visions of the having to wake up at four in the morning so I could catch the bus that took all the kids (all the kids - elementary, middle school, and high schoolers alike) within a 50 mile radius to my new school, which would be filled with nothing but extreme-right wing cowboys. I was willing to bet there was no gymnastics team, either at the school or the rec center (would there even be a city rec center?), which meant I could kiss my favorite sport goodbye. Was there going to be anything to do in this little podunk town?

  It took several days to drive from San Francisco to Colorado. We reached Stevens Ridge in the early afternoon on a Tuesday, and as we pulled into the city limits I felt a little embarrassed at how judgmental I had been. Just because Stevens Ridge was smaller than any of the larger cities we had lived in didn't mean that it was automatically a small town. As we got off the interstate I saw a movie theater and a big box retailer as well as several of the standard fast food joints. We drove through the center of the city to get to our house, and I saw several interesting places that I was already planning on checking out, including a used book store, a custom costume shop, an exotic pet store, and a few charming-looking cafes. It was obvious there weren't any stadiums or arenas for sporting events or concerts, but we were only about an hour away from Denver, so if any interesting bands came through I wouldn't be completely cut off from the cultural world. As I thought about all this I reminded myself that sixty thousand people was still a lot for a town and I certainly wasn't going to get to know everyone in any short time. It was a small comfort, but I was still uncomfortable with how far out everything was spaced and the sense of emptiness it had compared to big cities.

  Our new house was about ten minutes away from the interstate. It was in a neighborhood with houses built farmhouse style, with big porches and at least two levels. I was in awe as we pulled up to our new home - we had never lived in a house that was so big. In fact, having lived in so many large cities we mostly lived in apartments or condos. I suppose that because of that fact I never realized how much money my parents actually made between the two of them. I would never have assumed that they made enough to afford the two story farm house with both a back and a front yard that we were pul
ling in to.

  It was exactly the kind of house that's portrayed in the stereotypical American dream; two stories, painted a light navy blue with an off-white roof, white shutters, and a wooden porch large enough to hold a couple of chairs or a swinging bench as well as a couple of bikes. There was even a waist-high white picket fence around the front yard, and I caught a glance of a taller wooden fence blocking off the back yard. Flowers lined both the paved walkway to the front yard and the driveway to the attached garage. We actually had a garage. We had never had a garage before! To complete the picture there were a couple of aspen trees in the front yard, and I could see the top of a large oak tree in the back yard.

  I hated it.

  I was willing to try to accept everything else about Steven's Ridge and the adjustments we'd have to make to living in a smaller town, but this just felt so... normal. Average. Which my family was most decidedly not. We weren't the type to live the stereotypical American dream. While I had hoped that we would eventually settle down, I had imagined it would be in a place more like San Francisco, where my family could be the modern hippies that we had always lived as and not stick out like a sore thumb. On the outside we seemed normal, but I was positive that the suburbanites would mark us as outcasts once they heard my parents' notions on religion and politics. I'm sure our vegetarianism alone would probably freak them out. This just wasn't our natural environment.

  I was nervously rubbing the beads on my necklace as my Dad put the moving truck in park. It was a habit I had when I was in uncertain situations - my necklace was normally tucked into my shirt, but I pulled it out every once in a while when I was feeling anxious. I'd twist the chain around my fingers, rub each of the beads in a specific order, and even bite on the silver charm if I was by myself.

  "Well, here we are! What a place, eh? Let's look around the house and choose out our rooms before unloading everything," my dad said cheerfully. I hopped out of the cab and looked at my younger brother and older sister as they got out of one of our cars, which my mom had been driving. (The other car was hitched to the back of the truck to save on gas, even though both Terra and I had our licenses.) Arvin was always hard to read anyway, so I couldn't tell if he was either complacent or apathetic. Terra looked thrilled - I'm sure that this place was exactly the kind of place she had always dreamed of living in. She always hated moving the most out of all of us kids, and this was exactly the kind of place that screamed, "live here forever!" I wished that my oldest brother, Ammon, was with us. He and I were a lot alike and he would probably share my hatred of this place with me.

  We opened the door and filed into the entryway one by one. From the front door we could see a living room, a study or music room shut off by glass French doors, a hallway leading to another large room - probably the kitchen or dining room - and directly in front of us was a staircase leading to the second storey.

  I followed Arvin and Terra up the stairs while mom and dad stayed on the main level to check it out - the master bedroom and bathroom was to the left, while to the right there was a hallway where the rest of the bedrooms and the shared bathroom was.

  "I call this one!" I heard Terra's voice say from inside the one of the bedrooms as I exited the master bedroom. I followed her in and looked around. It was pretty bland, really - just an average-sized room with an average-sized window and closet. The view wasn't even all that great, since it was facing the front of the house. I checked out the bedroom next to it, in which Arvin had laid down on the floor and staring up at the ceiling.

  "I call this one," he said.

  Whatever. I had never really cared much about picking rooms in our previous apartments, and was actually pretty excited about having my own room. Normally Terra and I had to share one, so any room of my own was going to be a good thing.

  Well, that's what I thought until I went into what was going to have to be my bedroom. It was, in every architectural sense, a better room. The window was wider and let in more light, and the room had a door going directly into the bathroom since I was right next to it. It was the view that really killed it.

  It looked directly into our backyard, which was large enough to have the oak tree and still enough room to look out beyond that. Past our fence was a roughly-paved access road, and after that was a graveyard.

  "Can I trade one of you guys?!" I shouted out my door.

  "No!" Came the simultaneous reply from the other two bedrooms. "You snooze, you lose!" Great. I got a room with the most magnificently morbid view. Mom and dad didn't even have to worry about it since the oak tree was blocking the view out their window.

  I suppose that there wasn't anything inherently wrong with that view. In fact as far as cemeteries went it was a rather lovely one, with a couple of small mausoleums, a few shade trees and some marble statues in it. It was just bizarre that it was right behind our house and it gave me the creeps. Now I'd know any time someone in the town died, which was just depressing. At least I'd be the first to know if there was a zombie uprising, I tried to joke to myself.

  Mom and Dad had caught up with us and entered my room. "Well, that's quite the view!" my dad commented and patted my shoulder.

  "Yeah. It's... cheery," I replied hollowly.

  "Don't think too much about it. When your dad and I were newly married and Ammon was just a baby we lived next to a graveyard. It was nice, actually, because the house was cheaper and the neighborhood was quieter," mom told me encouragingly.

  "Super." I trudged out the door and went downstairs to see what was there.

  The back of the house was pretty open, with the kitchen and dining room taking up most of the space. There were a bunch of windows, letting in a lot of light, and thanks to the fence around the backyard there wasn't a view of the graveyard at all.

  I opened the sliding glass door to the backyard and stepped down onto the small paved area, taking a look around at what we had. Again, it was absolutely perfect for living the ideal suburban life - a paved area just large enough to have a barbeque grill and picnic table, and a grassy area just large enough to set up a variety of outdoor activities. The previous tenants had even tied a rope swing onto a branch of the tree. It was disgustingly normal and I felt like gagging.

  I heard Dad call to us to go out front so we could help unload the truck. It was the middle of the day and with most people still at work or school no one noticed us moving in, but that was fine. We had loads of experience moving our own stuff, and since we didn't have anything ridiculously heavy like a piano, we made quick work of it.

  We were done unloading the truck by six, and went to a Mexican restaurant we had passed on Center Street for dinner. I was surprised at how good it was, considering it was in the middle of the Rockies, and had to chastise myself for again assuming everything would be bland. Once we got home we built our bed frames, made our beds and set up what we'd need for the evening and next day, like the bathrooms and some of the kitchen. Mom went grocery shopping for some food essentials, and by the time we had gotten to a comfortable point it was already nine thirty, which was late enough for a family who had spent the last week packing up their lives, driving halfway across the country, and unpacking most of their belongings. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  The next day was solely devoted to unpacking and setting everything up; the goal was to have no cardboard boxes just sitting around by dinner time. Mom and dad went out to set up at their jobs and enroll Arvin at the middle school and myself at the High School, while us kids unpacked and organized everything.

  The whole process is frightfully dull, I'm afraid, since we had everything down to a pretty solid routine. Nothing was lost or broken, and after my siblings and I had unpacked and set up everything in our rooms we teamed up to set up the living room and kitchen. The only thing that my parents didn't want us to touch was the workroom equipment, which was left in the unfinished apartment above the garage. Dad was very par
ticular about his carving tools and Mom had some pretty fragile reference books, so they wanted to handle those things themselves.

  I decided that my bedroom wasn’t all that bad when I went to bed that night. Actually, it was really nice, as long as I ignored what was right outside. I left the curtains open so the cracked window would let in a breeze. The moon was halfway visible from where I lay, and lit my room with a soft glow. I wouldn’t say it was quiet outside – there was the occasional car that drove by, crickets chirping, breeze rustling the leaves. You know, all the natural stuff you expect to hear at night, but it was peaceful.

  I was just about to fall asleep when the noises stopped. Now, I’m not the most observant of people and probably wouldn’t have noticed if it were, say, simply that the crickets stopped chirping. But this particular quiet was so very complete and… intense. Like when you’re taking an important test and everyone is quiet, but you can feel the tension in the air. My room no longer felt peaceful at all. I tried pulling the blankets over my head, hoping that the silence I made in my little cave would cover the silence in my room and I could go to sleep, but it didn’t work. I was suddenly very awake.

  I got out of bed quickly, hoping that sleeping on the living room couch tonight would be better. As I started towards the door I glanced out of my window and froze. There were people in the cemetery, and from what I could tell they were definitely not there for a late night visit to a family member.

  I stood at my window and watched in fascination. There were three figures total, fighting each other. One of them was a male, though I couldn’t make out the age. It wasn’t that he was too far away; it was just that at one angle he looked like he could be in his late twenties, and the next he looked like he was my age. Other than that, there wasn’t anything unusual about him, except maybe his sense of style. It looked like he had dyed streaks in his hair, though in the dark I couldn’t tell what color. He had a long black trench coat on over a plain shirt and dark jeans. The trench coat seemed warm for the weather, but I suppose if you wanted to sneak around in the dark it would be appropriate.

  The other two looked… unusual. They were also male, and definitely looked middle aged, but something about them struck me as not quite right. Their movements were weird – one moment they were running after the young man in a way that looked like they were constantly stumbling in shoes that were too big for their feet, but once they got close enough to the other guy they struck out in a quick, fluid way that suggested they were not entirely that clumsy. They also looked… unhealthy. Their skin was very pale, and their hair was all tangled up and knotted. Their clothes were dirty and torn in some places.

  One of them turned to face my direction completely and I had to bite down hard on my knuckles to keep from screaming. He was missing the skin and eye from the right side of his face. It didn’t look recent, either – there were splotches on his face that looked like blood, but it didn’t shine in the moonlight like a fresh wound would.

  I watched in horror as the two older men fought against the younger man. The younger man sprinted towards a mausoleum, running behind it and out of my sight. He was just fast enough that it took a few seconds for the older men to catch up. They went around the same side he did, but by the time they reached the mausoleum the younger man was sneaking around the other side to circle up behind them. I watched as he reached into his jacket and pulled out two long items. As he situated one in each hand I could make out that one was a knife and the other… well, it just looked like a pointy stick. He paused a moment, listening for the other two. I don’t know what he was listening for, but he must have heard it because he suddenly ran around to the back of the mausoleum where the other two were, ready to attack them.

  They were all out of sight at this point, but I heard a sound that possibly came from a human, though it sounded terrible. It was low, guttural, and came from a voice that was seemed to be only partly functional. I saw the younger man fly back and slam into a grave stone. It looked like he slammed into it pretty hard, but he was standing up again by the time the two monsters caught up with him again. (Monster is a good word, right? I didn’t want to believe that monsters existed, but from what I could tell there wasn’t really a more appropriate word.) I watched as he slashed into them with the knife. Every slash he made into their skin made a sizzling sound and smoke come from the wound, but it didn’t slow the monsters down at all.

  Finally the young man got a good chance to strike at one of the monsters – right into the throat with the knife. But here was the worst part – the monster didn’t fall at all. It was obviously distracted, what with the fact that the knife was, somehow, burning its flesh, but all it did was stumble back and grapple with the knife to try and get it out.

  This distracted the other monster just long enough for the guy in black to take the pointed stick and shove it up into its ribcage. That, at least, caused the monster to stop entirely. It collapsed on the ground, and – I kid you not – started decomposing. One minute there was a humanoid pile of flesh, and within fifteen seconds there was a pile of a few bones and clothes.

  I was so fascinated by this that I almost missed the younger man kill off the other monster. He yanked the knife out of the monster’s throat, kicked the monster down to the ground, and then in two very firm, quick strikes completely decapitated the monster. It started decomposing exactly like the other one did.

  Once the young man seemed satisfied that the pile of bones was going to stay down, he went to go retrieve his stick from the pile of bones from the first monster. As he straightened from picking it up, he glanced up towards me, and did a double take. He was staring right at me, and I was frozen in place. What was I supposed to do? Wave? Shout out, ‘Nice job, you got ‘em good!?’ His eyes narrowed as he kept staring. I couldn’t take it anymore and just fell to the floor, out of his sight. I breathed as slowly and silently as I could, paranoid that, even from his distance, he could hear the smallest of noises.

  I don’t know how much time passed, but eventually nighttime noises started up again. I could see my curtains gently moving from the breeze; hear the leaves rustling, and the crickets chirping. I could even hear something disturbing the pond in our neighbors’ back yard, and the sound of moving water helped me relax enough to help me fall asleep, right where I was on the floor.