Available Darkness Season 1

window.
    There were no sounds of a drunken father downstairs. The world was a silent graveyard, save the storm churning outside.
    A light appeared under his doorway ― someone was in the hall.
    Johnny?
    Caleb was about to climb out of bed when he noticed something flint black on his white sheet — a knife. A shiver ran down his spine. He picked it up and headed for his door.
    He stepped out of his room, but not into his hallway, but rather a seemingly endless corridor with hundreds of doors stretching into infinity. The lights above, as many as there were doors, flickered in unison, casting the hall in strobe light as the boy followed intuition down the corridor.
    Ahead, one of the doors shook in its frame.
    Fear slithered through the boy’s guts, but he crept forward, emboldened by the blade now humming and burning bright in his hand like some magical sword.
    He reached the door. The lights flickered, then went dark. He paused, hand on the doorknob. The lights flickered back on.
    He wasn’t alone.
    His little brother, Johnny, stood beside him, in blood-splattered PJ’s.
    “Don’t go in there,” Johnny warned of the room Caleb was about to enter.
    The lights flickered out again. Caleb felt something whip past him and he flinched, lashing out with the knife but striking nothing.
    The lights came on again and this time Johnny was a fully grown man.
    “Don’t go in there,” he warned.
    “You!” Caleb said, “ You killed Julia!”
    The lights flickered on and off as the wind howled outside, chunks of God knows what repeatedly hitting the windows and roof. Something whipped past him in the darkness, scratching his arm. He lashed out with the knife, this time striking something solid. Both Caleb and victim fell sprawling to the ground in the darkness. When the lights flickered on, Caleb was on top of his little brother, who was a child again, a pool of crimson soaking through the front of Johnny’s pajamas.
    “Don’t go in there,” Johnny said, gasping for air, blood bubbling from his mouth as the lights overhead continued their chaotic rhythm.
    “I have to,” Caleb said as he stood up and faced the door now rattling in its frame. He reached out, but the knob refused to turn.
    “Omnusob Ahtwhan Cognizi,” Caleb said, though he wasn’t sure where the words had come from or what they meant.
    The doorknob clicked. The lights went out and the world was cast into darkness.
    Caleb stepped into the room, which wasn’t anything like the others in the house. No, this was a well-lit, fancy hotel room. One he’d been in before. The room went dark again and someone screamed. A woman, her voice familiar.
    The scream grew louder in the dark, and another joined. The second voice, a man’s, drowned the woman’s cry. The man’s scream grew louder, almost animalistic. Caleb’s knees began to shake and his jaw chattered as the scream turned into a wailing cry.
    Then everything fell silent.
    Caleb stood perfectly still, vaguely making out the shapes in front of him where the hotel bed had been. A man spoke, “Julia?”
    The lights flickered on and the boy saw the dead body on the bed. And the murderer crying over his wife’s burned corpse.

    **

    Caleb awoke, tears streaming down his face, agents surrounding him.
    “I remember,” he said.
    “What’s going on?” Mike asked, helping Caleb up. “Remember what?”
    “Everything. Now give me your keys.”
    “What?” Mike asked.
    “Give me your keys; I know where John Sullivan is. I’m going alone.”
    “The hell you are,” Mike said, “I have specific instructions not to let you…”
    Caleb pulled a gun on Mike, “Fuck your instructions, Mike. Give me the keys.”

    * * * *

CHAPTER 12 — John and Caleb

    John

    John was greeted at the doorway by two gunmen in gear matching the goons from back at the motel. Both barrels were aimed straight at his forehead.
    “We need to search you,” one of the two men said.
    “You’re not searching shit,” John barked, calling their bluffs, and walking right past them.
    He sensed 10 armed men in total. Six in the house and four outside, two in sniper positions on the roofs of the garage and guest house. Downstairs in the basement, he sensed three Others, two on the edge of monstrous. What he could not sense, however, was Abigail.
    Either she wasn’t there or her signal was being dampened by someone.
    Two stairways wound to a landing on the second floor, where Jacob appeared like some macabre Master of