Available Darkness Season 1

the black backdrop.
    “I’m sorry I took so long,” the shadow said, its voice strained and brittle enough to break in the slightest of breezes. Despite the voice’s fragile quality, the shadow seemed to exude an incredible force of undiluted strength, which gathered in the boy’s bedroom like a slowly churning funnel cloud, absorbing every available shadow and casting itself into an impossible shroud of darkness.
    “Wh… What?” was all the boy could manage.
    Downstairs, his father piped up again, screaming incoherent curses at the boy’s mom.
    The shadow’s head, if it indeed had one, spun quickly towards the boy’s bedroom door.
    “Ah, father is quite angry tonight, eh?”
    The boy’s bottom lip trembled as the shadow swirled even faster, as if gathering a solid mass of twisted knots of sinew, forming into something.
    “You … won’t need to … worry any long … er,” the voice said. The shadow man drifted towards the doorway, shadows trailing him along the walls, floor and ceiling like floating streamers tied to an automobile.
    “No!” the boy cried out, “Don’t…”
    The shadow stopped and turned, fixing its eyes — if the two burning blue spheres were indeed eyes — on the boy.
    “Surely … you want him to stop … hurting you … yes?” it asked.
    A million thoughts raced through the boy’s mind.
    What is this thing?
    Why did it apologize for being so late?
    Did the devil finally come to answer my prayers for God to kill my dad?
    The boy was awash in guilt, fear, and confusion. The monster waited, its shadows swirling around it like wisps of smoke caught in a holding pattern … waiting for the boy to give the command.
    “It can … all … be … over,” the thing said, its voice seemingly weaker, giving the boy the impression that if he didn’t act now, this thing, whatever it was, would go away forever.
    “You stupid cunt!” his father screamed, followed by a sickening thump of his fist on the boy’s mother.
    Now or never.
    “Kill him,” the boy said, his eyes suddenly steel marbles of clarity and conviction.
    The monster flew from the room, its form tightening into an ever more human shape until the boy could clearly make out the features of a face, and two, impossibly blue eyes. It turned to the boy, the shadows of its face rising in a smile.
    “You w … won’t regret this, Caleb.”

    * * * *

CHAPTER 14 — Caleb

    Caleb woke with the embers of the dark creature’s eyes still singed in his memory.
    He glanced at the clock — only a scant hour of sleep had hollowed his bones. His head pounded as he tried to clear the cobwebs from his mind. He stumbled into the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and cradled his head in his hands as he emptied his bladder. The lights were off, but he could do nothing about the bright light spilling into the memory of his sleep.
    That wasn’t a dream.
    The thought led to a shudder. The images continued to loop on replay in his mind, feeling less like the sequences of a dream and more like a forgotten memory.
    A buried memory.
    A terrible itch raged from the deepest recesses of his brain as he stood up. Caleb approached the bed and collapsed on top of the sheets, eager to return to the dream, turning the newest pieces of the puzzle and trying to make sense of what he saw.
    Caleb’s early memories were fuzzy at best. The only things he could recall with any clarity didn’t come until after his birth parents were killed in a car accident and he was adopted by Ed and Myriam Baldwin. He vaguely remembered his birth father, though certainly not as the abusive man who haunted his dreams. His father had been…
    You can’t remember what he was like, can you?
    His mom was even more of a mystery. Suddenly, perhaps for the first time in decades, he wondered why he couldn’t remember his birth parents. A wave of guilt washed over him.
    He beat the hell out of you.
    Caleb shuddered as vague memories bubbled from somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind.
    He saw his birth father, a balding, working class man with a paunch and a horrible glare. As if prodded by the dream, memories surfaced. The version of his father he had carried for a lifetime was a forgery. Caleb suddenly remembered the man’s hateful gaze on him, judging him for one reason or another, always shaking his head in disgust.
    Oh God, how could I have buried this?
    He tried to pull more memories from the well, but it had run dry.
    He stared at the ceiling, then leaped up and