Crude Sunlight 1

By Phil Tucker

"Seriously, this book kept me on the edge of my seat from the beginning. It dug its claws in deep and hung on until the bitter end." On A Book Bender

When his younger brother goes missing, Thomas Verkraft comes to Buffalo to find him. Following a trail of terrifying black and white photographs and homemade videos, he tracks Henry down to the doors of the Buffalo State Asylum.

It's a grand and terrible building. Abandoned over forty years ago, its rooms and halls no longer ring with tortured screams.
Yet it's the last building his brother entered before he disappeared.

Genre: Horror/Ghost
Note: This is the first of three installments, each about 100 pages and all of which have been published.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phil Tucker
• Release date: Feb 24, 2014

Phil Tucker

I'm a young Brazilian Brit living out in the woods of Western MA with my wife and small dog Simon.

Book preview

Crude Sunlight

CRUDE SUNLIGHT 1

by Phil Tucker

Copyright

Crude Sunlight 1

Phil Tucker

Published by Phil Tucker at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Phil Tucker

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

To my first draft reading crew, fearless and honest, and to Jeff Vandermeer for the encouraging words.

Many thanks to Lukasz Kapa for allowing me to use his photograph for the cover.

Chapter 1

Dusk was falling by the time Thomas arrived in Buffalo and parked his Mercedes outside his missing brother's building, the sky a deep shade of blue that darkened to cobalt toward the east. He got out and slammed the door, invigorated by the cold, pausing to look up at the sky, at the ragged, collapsing castles of cloud that were fading to darker shades of gray. He felt good. He felt energized by the drive, by the aggressive way he'd handled the car on the way up from New York, the manner in which he'd courted the cops, daring them to pull him over. Escaping the problems at home, cauterizing frustration with speed. It was a near miracle that he hadn't been stopped.

His brother's apartment complex was grim, hunched and sullen looking like a pair of crossed arms, rising some six stories into the air. Spatterings of snow crusted the window ledges, were scraped into low drifts lining the approach to the glass lobby doors. A vague attempt at an ornamental garden had been made and then abandoned before the entrance, leaving a circular swathe of withered grass around a bare gravel pit. It was his second time out here, the first having been August last year when he'd helped Henry moved in for his Junior year. He'd never found the time to come back to visit. Ah well. He'd been busy. Missing Henry could ask missing Michelle if he didn't believe him.

Suddenly chilled, Thomas hunched his shoulders and stepped up onto the curb, crossed the wide cement pavement and up to the doors. They were locked. A small steel panel with an LCD screen emitted a dull green glow to his left, and leaning down he squinted at the blocky text and pressed the pound key several times till he came to a list of names. Scrolling, he searched and found and then buzzed Materday, the superintendent.

A long pause. Finally the panel crackled to life. Yello?

Mr. Materday, this is Thomas Verkraft. I've come about Unit 457?

Oh... the missing kid. I see. Thomas pursed his lips and waited as the super processed this information. Materday had been the first to notice Henry's disappearance, calling Thomas when the second month's rent had gone unpaid. A chill wind picked up suddenly, blowing through the parking lot, lifting his collar. Thomas checked his watch--almost 7pm. The stock market would soon be opening in China, and things would be picking up at the office in New York. Nothing else seemed forthcoming from the panel. Suddenly annoyed, he opened his mouth to say something sarcastic but the door buzzed before he could so. Come on in, then. I'll meetcha in the lobby.

Materday backed out of a service door next to the elevator and turned to stare at Thomas. He hadn't improved since the last time they had met. Short, fat, and swarthy, the superintendent had small eyes and a large, splayed nose that must have been broken several times over the course of his life. His chin was practically nonexistent, giving him the appearance of a sly frog in a hunter's cap with the ear flaps down.

Verkraft? Thomas nodded, and the super looked down at a massive ring of keys he held in one hand. After a few nervous, darting gestures he finally removed one and gave it to Thomas. Here's the spare. When are you gonna be done?

Thomas took it, impressed by the man's indifference. No questions, no concern over the tenant that had been missing for three months now. Probably by tomorrow afternoon. I'm going to see how much there is tonight, and call the moving guys tomorrow morning.

Materday sniffed loudly, pointedly, and nodded. All right, good. Have the key back to me tomorrow by 8pm at the latest. Anything left behind gets chucked out on Monday. Got it?

Thomas looked down at the man and struggled to stay calm. Don't get upset with this little turd, he thought. Just ignore him. He nodded, and something about his stare unnerved the super, who turned and bustled back through the service door. Left alone in the lobby, Thomas glanced at the key and then turned to summon the elevator. Entering, he hit the button for the fourth floor and let his eyes unfocus. He'd filed a missing persons report when Materday has called him a month ago, but nothing had come of it. Just disappeared, had been the cop's verdict, like thousands of others across the country. The legion of the vanished. They had interviewed Henry's friends, spoken to his professors, given his apartment a cursory search, but the police had come up with no reason to suspect foul play. Their conclusion: that Henry had simply taken off, another kid inspired by On The Road or Into The Wild. Materday had called yesterday to see if Thomas as the co-signer would pay Henry's rent. He'd agonized over the decision all night long, and when he'd finally called to say no it had felt like telling a doctor to pull the plug.

The elevator shuddered to a stop, the doors rattled open, and Thomas stepped out. The hall reeked of wet dog, and was the kind of place that roaming site locators for zombie movies would die for, sending back copious photographs and floor plans with adjectives like creepy! and moody-esque! written all over them. It was poorly lit, the ceiling lights placed a little too far from each other, the carpet a dull, neutral vomit color somewhere between brown and beige. Each end terminated in a fire door, large and ponderous, the iron looking like it had been beaten with hammers. Behind each small, wire-meshed window flickered the lights of the stairwells, and Thomas easily imagined a bloody hand suddenly smacking against the glass.

Henry had lived but two doors down from the elevator, and Thomas quickly unlocked the door and escaped the fetid stench into the dark apartment. Which, Thomas noticed immediately, still had a faint, lingering smell of incense in the air. Henry hadn't been a fan of the dog stench either, it seemed.

The grey light of dusk came in from the broad window on the far side of the living room, illuminating the small apartment with clear, wintry hues. The last time he'd seen it the place had been almost empty. Henry had brought a few boxes of books, a closet full of clothing, a mattress, and little else. Thomas stood in the tiny entrance hallway and remembered the fierce pleasure that Henry had felt for his new apartment, how he had stood with his hands on his hips gazing out through the window as if surveying his kingdom. The sunlight then had been golden, autumnal. Now the light was cold and hard, and nobody stood framed in its pale radiance.

Taking a deep breath, wishing Michelle were here to help, to make a wry comment or simply give his arm a squeeze, he stepped forward, past the small kitchen on the right, cramped and dark, a mess of dirty plates and glasses in the sink. Henry had acquired some furniture, the kind of items you might pick off the curb or buy cheap on the internet. A battered blue couch was set against one wall, facing an ancient, bloated TV set on a short, wide bookcase against the other. A desk was set under the window, its surface dominated by a computer.

Turning, Thomas poked his head through the bedroom door. A rumpled single bed under the window, the sheets littered with large print photographs, casually shaken out of a manila envelope. An open closet door filled with what looked like mostly monochromatic clothing. A bookcase, a bedside table.

Bare basics. Reaching out, he flicked on the lights and fluorescent bulbs bathed everything in an immediate wash of stark, sterile white light, the dust suddenly visible and ubiquitous, lying thickly on the table top and photographs, on the barren length of the window sill, on the framed picture of their parents. It covered everything in sight.

Melancholia took him by the throat. He'd never been very close to Henry; seven years his senior, and preoccupied with his career, he'd paid little attention to his strange and introverted younger brother. When was the last time he'd seen him? Six months now, perhaps, since Henry had come through New York en route to beginning his junior year. Thomas and Michelle had taken him out to a fancy restaurant--D'Orsia--and then dropped him off to go meet up with some of his friends. Thomas had had an early meeting for the next day which had dragged until late afternoon, and by the time he'd managed to escape he'd only had time to take Henry to the airport.

Still musing, distracted, he wandered over to Henry's bed. Thick, slightly curved glossy prints in atmospheric black and white lay over the rumpled sheets like strange autumn leaves. Had the cops gone through them? Reaching down, he picked one up at random and examined it. At first it was hard to determine the subject matter. And then, like a ship emerging from the fog, he saw it. It was a large tunnel, smooth-sided with an iron ladder affixed to the left wall. The flash had caused the water running along the tunnel's bottom to shine like a river of mercury, and in the distance a vague figure could be seen running away into the darkness.

Frowning, he turned it over, and saw a note scribbled in Henry's spider crawl in the lower right corner: Nov. 17, 3:43am, Steam tunnels under State Hospital. Thomas turned the photo over again and examined the fleeing figure, holding the photograph to the light. It was small, a smudge of arms and legs, a pale face turned over its shoulder as it ran away from Henry. How odd.