The Dancer in the Dark

By Brad Strickland

When cantankerous Professor Cletus Tremaine receives a summons to the hills of North Georgia to consult on an archaeological discovery, he doesn't dream that the trip will uncover the secrets of an ancient, hidden evil. With each step, the thing hidden in the Malatowa Mounds increasingly gains strength, and its stirring transforms the sleepy little area to a scene of stark horror.

Intriguing, fast-paced, and taut, the novel builds suspense all the way to a mind-shattering climax, a confrontation between good and evil that will spell death for some and - just perhaps - escape for others.

The Dancer in the Dark is a tale of Lovecraftian horror that will haunt your nightmares.

Cover art: Joe DeVito

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brad Strickland
• Release date: Aug 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452451817

Brad Strickland

Brad Strickland is also the author of Aladdin's Pirate Hunter trilogy as well as many middle-grade novels based on licensed properties, including Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Star Trek.

Book preview

The Dancer in the Dark

a novel by

Thomas E. Fuller and Brad Strickland

Copyright 2011 Brad Strickland and the Thomas E. Fuller Family Trust

Published by Brad Strickland at Smashwords

Cover image copyright 2011 Joe DeVito. Used by permission.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Part 1: A Hint of Shadows

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part 2: Necropolis

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Part 3: Whispers

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Part 4: Something Waking

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Part 5: Shadow Storm

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Authors' Note

About the Authors

To the children of Thomas E. Fuller: Edward, Anthony, John, and Christina. And, of course, to Thomas.

Many thanks to the members of the Dark River Writers of Atlanta, a group to which Thomas and I both belonged. Special thanks to Thomas's old friends Ron Butler and Doug Kaye, who offered much-appreciated and much-needed help in proofreading and editing.

PART 1: A HINT OF SHADOWS

From the Journals of Professor Cletus Tremaine:

There is in the world a certain order, a certain sense of the correct and proper. This order is all around us. We see it in the neatly structured way the seasons follow one after the other, the way the Earth marches steadily around the sun, God's own clockwork wonder. And it is never more apparent then when it is gone, when it is eclipsed by something else, blotted out, eradicated. In those moments when reality stumbles, we can look through the pillars of our sanity and see the shadows—and the dwellers in shadows. And we can see how fragile our order is; we can see how easily it can all come tumbling down around us. How easy it would be to bow to shadows. How terribly easy.

Chapter 1

On the weathered porch slept an old hound, wrapped in loose skin and years. Age had touched him but had left him massive in the way that only a muscular, carefully-bred hunting dog could be. Whenever he stood, his skin hung on him in wrinkled folds. One sharp, yellowing tooth protruded from his gray muzzle.

He slept curled in almost a complete circle. Crumpled beneath him lay the rag rug he had slept on every night for twelve years, stained, familiar, and rich with his own scent. From time to time the old dog stirred restlessly, hind legs churning in a parody of pursuit, nostrils flaring, questing for phantom scents. But mostly he slept quietly, his breathing slow, regular, and sonorous.

Night had come and his old mistress had not returned. She had gone off to visit someone, someplace. Nowadays she did that a lot. Used to be, when she did that the Man stayed behind with him. In those days the Man sat on the porch in his rocker next to the hound, and the two of them watched the peaceful evening get darker and darker.

But then the Man went away and never came back and now there was only the old Woman, and she often went away for days at a time, visiting. The dog had become used to dreaming away solitary days and nights. Loneliness did not bother him.

In a dream, Man came back and whistled, standing in the front yard with a shotgun angled on his shoulder, ready for a hunt. The dark woods beckoned, the scent of rabbit teased, and the hound whimpered a little, missing the hunts, the rough and comforting ruffling of his head, the highest compliment: Good boy. Good dog. The big animal shuddered, on the verge of waking, but the dream passed.

The Woman hadn't forgotten him. She never did. She had arranged with one of the neighbor boys to come and feed him and keep his water bowl clean and filled. The only thing wrong, from the dog's point of view, was that the boy never came twice at the same time of day. When you got old, you got set in your ways.

On the other hand, the old hound had not gone hungry or thirsty.

With a low rattling growl, a mutter of discomfort or discontent, the dog stirred again in his sleep. Some scent had reached him, something in the air, seeping down into the dark dreaming fields where the young dog ran strong and powerful, the Man with his gun at the ready coming close behind—

The alien scent drew the hound right out of sleep, back to the rug and the porch and the warm night air. The great head with its long ears came up, the eyes opening—eyes not filmed with age, not yet. He lifted his head and uncoiled his body, getting to his feet, the fur on his shoulders bristling. A threatening rumble rattled up from his chest as he stared off into the night.

Occasional weak flickers of distant lightning over the horizon made distant hills black against a silvery-gray background. The hound tilted his head, listening. Aside from the katydids and the late cicadas, the night slept quietly. Overhead and to the south, stars scattered bright across the darkness of sky, darker pines silhouetted against it. The scent of pine cut through everything, sharp as a saw across wood. Full night had fallen, but even in the deepening gloom the hound, swinging his head, could see other buildings, their white clapboards a faint gray. That way led to the town, where the Man used to take him some Saturdays, in the back of a pickup truck. The other direction led to woods and fields and hills that led to the southern peaks of the Appalachians—the dog did not know this from direct experience, but he sensed the loom of the mountains.

His muzzle swung from side to side, testing, searching. Something strange and disturbing in the air tonight . . . .

He had it, a faint scent, but there, floating invisible in front of him. A scent different from anything he knew, troubling, foreign. The rumbling became a savage growl. The dog stepped stiffly off the porch, onto the steps, head low. Something out there, in his yard, in front of his house, something that had no business being here.

He had never allowed anything that didn't belong into the Man's and Old Woman's yard. Never. Now the old dog ran, rangy but swift for his years.

The grass under his paws, and the disturbing scent grew thick, stronger. The dog's heavy jowls rippled as the black lips curled away from powerful teeth.

Around the house, across the broad side yard, toward the henhouse. The scent—feathers—feathers, blood, and something else, something acid and stomach-turning, like the rinds left after Old Woman made lemonade.

Something sick, rotten, revoltingly sweet and decaying at the same time, like…like something he and the Man had once hunted, years and years back.

A shape rose black against the starlight, an intruder in his yard. The growl started in his chest, grew louder in his throat, and came out in a savage snarl that vibrated his whole body. The thing didn't move, looming before him with its disturbing odors, its confusion of scents.

The dog gathered his muscles, ran faster, and leaped, hurling himself forward, mouth agape, teeth bared.

The shape vanished, or glided effortlessly aside, and a deep pain seared the dog's side. He landed badly, hard, but spun—and saw the shape again, mocking him. He lunged, favoring his right front leg, which tingled and burned.

The shape sank to the ground as he leaped, and the pain sliced this time through belly and groin, from below, from the shadow—

The old hound felt something spill from his gut as he crashed into one of the Old Woman's flower beds. He felt life going, but he tried again, dragging himself around over his own entrails. This time the pain sliced across his throat, and his strength left him and he dropped to the ground, tasting his own blood, sides heaving, trying to breathe.

The hateful thing moved over to him. The dog gave one last gasp and died.

What happened next took a long time.

But well before sunrise the shape had moved and everything lay still. The dog—what was left of the dog—lay in a bed of crushed purple asters.

A rooster crowed—not in this yard, but from off in the distance—and as if in answer a sultry breeze stirred, dispersing the scents.

Nothing stirred in the yard. Nothing had been left to stir.

Not until the sun rose and the eager flies swarmed.

Chapter 2

Good morning. Here is the news for today, October 13, 1928. Maria Feodorovna, the widow of Alexander III, the last Czar of Russia, has died in her native Denmark—

Professor Emeritus Cletus Tremaine paused in his breakfast, a spoonful of soft-boiled egg poised halfway to his lips. He stared at the Atwater-Kent radio. What?

Did you want something, Professor? asked Martha, the housekeeper, from the adjoining kitchen.

Tremaine waved one bony hand. Shh. I'm listening to the radio.

But the newsreader evidently believed he had done his duty to exiled Romanov royalty and moved on, his tinny voice coming through a crackle of static: "The German dirigible Graf Zeppelin has reached the Azores on its first trans-Atlantic voyage—"

What did you say? Martha had one of those fireplug figures—four feet ten, and round as a cylinder. Tremaine didn't know how old she was, exactly. Somewhere between thirty and sixty. She bustled in with a coffee pot and poured a little into Tremaine's cup.

Nothing, Tremaine replied impatiently. He took a tentative sip of the refreshed coffee and found it too hot.It's just that Maria Feodorovna died.

Martha tilted her head and pursed her lips. Sorry to hear that, Professor. Relative?

The lean old man snorted. Hardly. I once met her though, the Czarina Maria, Empress of all the Russias. She did not hold that title when I was introduced to her, however. It was during one of my fellowships in Europe, I forget which one. Copenhagen, I think. The lady was strikingly beautiful as I recall.

And you a married man, Martha clucked disapprovingly, beginning to clear the table with a clatter of crockery before Tremaine had finished breakfast. There went the butter.

Gladys was with me, Tremaine snapped, making a point of holding onto his toast. This was when she was acting as my secretary. Anyway, I remember the Czarina-to-be as tall, willowy, and blonde. Very beautiful if a man is partial to the cool Nordic type. Her father, the King of Denmark, was blessed with an abundance of beautiful daughters, but I recall he referred to Maria—she was Princess Dagmar of Denmark at that time, though—as 'the smart one.'

Martha hovered over him, balancing dishes and cutlery. You'd better finish and get on your way, or you'll be late. If I were you, I'd stay home this morning. The weather's bad. But if you're planning to go to your office anyway, it's nearly eight o'clock now.

Tremaine gave the housekeeper a withering look. Martha, I am Professor Emeritus. Emeritus is Latin for 'on the shelf.' No one cares whether I come in on time or at all, for that matter—don't take that yet. Let me at least have my breakfast.

He turned his attention back to the remnants of eggs and toast, and Martha waddled out of the dining room and then immediately back in. Don't forget your rubbers. It's awful cold out there today. She began to brush crumbs from the table. I don't see why you bother yourself with some dead princess or Czarina or whatever she was, anyway.

Tremaine sighed. Perhaps because she died at the age of eighty-one. Just six years older than I am now. The coffee had cooled tolerably, and with a long swallow he drained the cup. You can do your worst, Martha. I'm finished. I will eat lunch in town and will be home again at five, as usual.

With a rattle of dishes, Martha said, Brush your hair before you go out! You know Mrs. Gladys wouldn't want you to look like some kind of scarecrow.

From the doorway, Tremaine said heavily, Gladys has been gone for five years. But he went to the bedroom, took out his military brushes, and tried to do something with his untidy mop of white hair. He would need a haircut soon. Or maybe he could adopt the hairstyle of the late Mark Twain. No, that would entail growing a mustache, and he’d tried that as an undergraduate with distressing results. He toyed with the idea of deliberately forgetting his galoshes, but decided the inevitable lecture from Martha wouldn't be worth the trouble. He shrugged into his heaviest wool overcoat, donned fedora and scarf and, with some difficulty, the rubbers, and then ventured out of the little house on Armitage Street in Arkham, Massachusetts.

He paused on the front stoop to pull on his gloves, a sharp and frosty wind making his cheeks sting. He faced a half-mile walk to Miskatonic University. The bitter cold, the first really Arctic blast of the year, had sneaked in from Canada the previous night and brought tears to his eyes. The miserable discomfort very nearly turned him around.

But what would he do all day, cooped up in the six-room bungalow with the efficient and disapproving Martha? Lowering his head so the scarf gave his nose some protection, clutching his overcoat tight at the collar, Tremaine trudged off for his office.

Against all the laws of physics, the icy wind screamed in from six different directions at once. At the foot of Armitage Street he turned left onto Market and passed along one side of the town square, his eyes streaming. The wind, tangled up with the jumble of architectures, buffeted him. It tried to snatch his fedora from his head—he slammed a gloved hand on the crown just in time—and then threatened to garrote him with the ridiculous scarf he wore, the nearly eight-foot-long muffler knitted by his sister Lavinia, whose main failing was an inability to know when to stop.

A right onto College Avenue, and something soft pelted Tremaine's forehead, then his cheeks. Snow, by all the gods. It was snowing.

I hate snow, Tremaine thought, wishing he had someone—wishing he had Gladys—to listen to his grumbling. Especially when it makes its first appearance in the middle of October! I hate this—this blizzard-in-training that the younger folks will call a flurry. Damn New Englanders and their stubborn determination never to grant the term storm to any snowfall that doesn't force them to exit their houses through their second-story windows!

The increasingly heavy snowfall had just begun to whiten the lawn when Tremaine reached the relative calm of the Quadrangle of Miskatonic University. He glanced longingly off to his left—across the street, just off-campus, once had stood the small, homey establishment that catered mostly to faculty members and businessmen. Though the brass plaque on the door had read University Club, in brutal honesty the business had all the earmarks of a saloon. It also offered all the comforts of one to graduate students, faculty, and the more intellectual businessmen of the town. However, eight years previously the Eighteenth Amendment had passed, Prohibition had slammed its unreasonable fist down, and the Club had gone north into Canada, together with Finnegan, the owner.

Now the Arkham Ladies Temperance Alliance had transformed the space into the New Jerusalem Tea Room, decorated with upliftingly dreary framed prints from Pilgrim's Progress and Fox's Book of Martyrs. And even that establishment would not open until noon. Finnegan had slept in the back of the Club, and anyone could tap on the door, rouse Finnegan, and pop in for a companionable nip of antifreeze at any time, day, night—or morning.

Tremaine sighed and hurried across the campus and toward the three-story red-brick structure that housed the Miskatonic University Departments of Archaeology and Anthropology on its second and third floors. The ground level, rooms crowded with relics, some decidedly eldritch, had been made into a museum.

Which, he reflected sourly, is exactly where I belong.

A hurrying, swaddled figure called out, Good morning, Professor Tremaine. A student. One of his former students, in fact, having returned to pursue a graduate degree after five years away from college. That much he realized instantly, but what the devil was his name?

Hello, hello, Tremaine said heartily, his breath fleeing in wisps. Are you studying hard? Keeping those grades up?

Yes, sir!

Good man! In that case I won’t delay you then, Mr.—great heavens, it’s cold! Goodbye!

Usually the name came, but not this time. Who was he? Face was familiar. Lawrence Carter? No. He died in ’18, shot down in his Spad VII, crashing in flames somewhere in France, two months shy of the Armistice. Who, then, was the young man who spoke to me? The name is tantalizingly just beyond reach of my memory. That will bother me all day.

Tremaine reached the Archaeology building and gratefully stepped into the foyer—it somehow always collected most of the heat, it had to be eighty-five degrees in there--stamped a surprising accumulation of snow from his galoshes, and then climbed up the squeaky old staircase to the second floor and went down a long hall, past darkened classrooms, and to his office.

His memory for student names might be failing, but at least he'd made it into the University another day. A small victory.

Chapter 3

The building seemed oddly quiet, the rooms strangely deserted. Then Tremaine smiled tiredly to himself. Of course. Saturday. So easy to lose track of the days of the week when one had no classes to meet, no lectures to prepare.

He turned on the green-shaded banker's light atop his enormous old desk, hung his hat, coat, scarf, and gloves on the coat rack, tugged his rubbers off and wiped his hands on a towel that had last been laundered in 1926, and at last sat gratefully down, his old chair creaking familiarly, its cracked leather accommodating his wiry frame. He looked past the silver-framed photos on the desk and gazed broodingly at the window opposite him. Snow drove hard against it, making ticking, scrabbling sounds, like the chittering of rats’ feet on ice.

Of course no one's about, he told himself silently. It’s not only Saturday, but the Big Game is today. Wonder how our students are finding the climate in Providence. Wish I were there—Providence offers a better selection of speakeasies and bootleggers. Damn Prohibition! I would shoot a puppy for a little shot of Scotch whisky right now. Oh, well, Prohibition has had one positive effect, as far as college students are concerned. It has effectively lowered the drinking age in this country to whatever their last birthday was. And I will demonstrate a bit of self control before taking my tot of brandy. I'm an adult. I can defer gratification.

Tremaine reached for a compact book, bound in green cloth, and spread it open before him. He donned the reading glasses that he had not needed until a year ago. Age creeping up. He began to leaf through the volume, pausing now and then to stare at what had been written there.

Page after page of his own spidery but very legible handwriting. The current Journal. He wondered which volume this was—fifty? Close to it, anyway. He had never broken himself of the habit of recording his thoughts for the benefit of his future self. Even now, when whatever time he had left might not give him enough future even to read through all the commentary, he felt the urge to fill another page or two. He uncapped his pen, filled it with dark blue ink, and turned the leaves of the journal to the first blank page. After staring toward the window for a few moments, he began to write:

*

Journal Entry: Saturday, October 13, 1928

I am beginning to go senile. This is not a whine, but a mere statement of fact, brought home to me earlier this morning when I experienced incredible difficulty in deciding whether to wear a gray suit or a blue one. As I lay wide awake in bed at six a.m., this subject actually gave me great concern, quite frankly more than I care to dwell on.

I had about decided on the gray when I recalled that Martha had dispatched both of my gray suits to the cleaners and that in a fit of fashion consciousness Gladys had thrown out my last remaining blue suit six years ago. It might have been all the rage in 1906, she told me, but it had aged beyond old-fashioned and had entered the quaint stage. And besides, she never liked blue on me. My eyes are such a silvery gray, she always said, that blue was unsuitable.

Six years is such a short time, and her memory is so sharp within—but I write too much of missing Gladys as it is. I save