Dark Neighborhoods: The Dark Journeys Trilogy, #1

By Charles Justus Garard

They are here -- the shape-shifting entities that can find you in your neighborhood, in your past, and even in your dreams. Dr. Harper Paget, whose ancestors have been at war with them for generations, comes to Atlanta from a university in Ilinois where he is a mythology professor to investigate other hauntings; he discovers that they are here in this community because of him. In ancient Greece, they were able to manifest as creatures known as the Lamiae, and in modern-day Indonesia, they have taken on the appearances of deadly creatures known as Kuntilanak. Harper's publication exposing them to the world and an ability he inherited from his grandmother is a deadly threat to him and to all of those around him.  Be careful of what you search for . . . they may find you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Justus Garard
• Release date: Apr 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9780990343547

Book preview

by

Charles Justus Garard

Copyright © 2012

Charles Justus Garard

All Rights Reserved

What is considered to be supernatural fantasy or myth in some parts of the world is regarded as part of everyday life in others

—Harper Paget PARANORMAL PURSUIT

Dedicated to Minagustina Wigan, without whose information and stories about Indonesian beliefs this novel could not have been written. A special thanks is extended to Don Blair and Aaron Gardner for their technical assistance.

I also greatly appreciate the contributions of Ratih, Menico, and Shirley Susanti-Anderson—all lovely Indonesia ladies. 

––––––––

Book cover photo by the author.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 In Medias Res

Chapter 2  The Beginning

Chapter 3 Olde Town

Chapter 4 Waterfront

Chapter 5 Lina

Chapter 6 Conspiracy Theories

Chapter 7 Jealousy

Chapter 8 Death in China

Chapter 9 The Farmhouse

Chapter 10 The Search

Chapter 11 The Fright

Chapter 12 The Voice on the Phone

Chapter 13 The Journeys

Chapter 14 Vampires of Argos

Chapter 15 Dweller in Two Worlds

Chapter 16 Death in the Sand

Chapter 17 Back hand. . . severed hand . . .

Chapter 18 The Puppet

Chapter 19 Thurisaz"

Chapter 20 Denouement

Chapter 1

In Medias Res

~

Harper ran. He couldn’t stop. The anger, the build-up of energy, the fear -– none of it would let him stop.

He ran along the black-topped trail that was marked for joggers and bicyclists heading east or west; at one time, the trail had been white-lined to separate joggers from bicycles – joggers on one side and bikes on the other. Now it was marked like a miniature highway, and bikes had to give way to joggers. Simple rules. Simple courtesy.

He had been both a jogger and a bicyclist. When he was on the bike, he rode as far as Boulevard; then he turned around near the liquor store. When he was on foot, however, he only ran as far as the bridge where the trail was separated from Freedom Parkway by a concrete abutment and an iron railing.

He started up the ramp section of the bridge. Jogging down the ramp from the west were two females in their early twenties. The girl nearest to Harper with pale skin and honey-blonde hair directed her greenish-blue eyes into his face. Their exchanged glance was almost a knowing look. It was more than just one of his three-second love affairs when he made and held eye contact with a passing woman and mentally went through all the stages of a love affair at lightning speed. This was something else.

He stared at the outlines of the tall downtown Atlanta buildings against the sunset; then he turned and jogged back toward the Carter Presidential Center and the winding streets that took him back into Star-Cross Corners. In the waning pinkish-yellow light of the evening, he searched for the two female joggers. No luck. They had long gone.

Mira’s dead!

I know, he told the voice.

Part of him tried to convince the rest of him that the voice was a simple fantasy, a delusion.  But he knew better. Something deeper wasn’t going to let him get off that easily, and that something replaced his few minutes of sobbing with furious anger; this gave his body so much energy that he felt like he wanted to run until he collapsed.

Just like your wife.

Shut up, he said.

The official report only stated that Mira, his Indonesian lady friend, had fallen from a hotel balcony in China, a hotel where she, as a sales representative for her clothing company, had stayed many times. What had not been explained, and perhaps never would be explained, was the condition of her body when they discovered it.  Somehow, her body looked as if it had been blown apart.  Regarding her head, the police used the term removed because it was nowhere to be found.

But it didn’t matter now that the police in Qian Shan, China, didn’t understand.

Harper did.

Only one entity could cause a human body to explode like that. Only a dukun or male witch doctor would have use for her lovely head.  Poor Mira. She had been, at least from her photos, a lovely Indonesian lady.

So he kept going. He jogged through the small plaza area and ran along the side streets of Star-Crossed Corners like a much-younger man, or a man in much better physical shape. This area, referred to by the locals as The Corners and written about in the press as Atlanta’s answer to Greenwich Village, was about three miles east of downtown. It over-lapped two counties; one could cross the six-land Melrose Avenue that streaked north and south through The Corners and suddenly be in the next county.

At the center of this small community where breezes that blew cool in budding spring were replaced in the summer months by hazy pollution and insufferable humidity, and at the juncture of two of the five converging streets which gave the area its name was a tree-lined, bench-lined, triangle-shaped plaza. Here musicians played guitars and bongo drums and flutes; itinerant peddlers hawked body oils and incense; unknown poets read from their personal chapbooks; suspender-wearing jugglers drew tourist attention, as well as coins; and rock-band groupies with nose-rings, pierced eyebrows, arm tattoos, and purple or orange hair -—both boys and girls -– worked as clerks in clothing stores and music shops.

These were, Harper had written in his notes about the area, the lost children of the rebels of the 1960s, the counter-culture turned decadent and lazy.

Two of them were arguing on the sidewalk as Harper approached.

Hey, Bitch. Shut up or I’ll kick your ass out into the street.

The boy who spoke wore eyebrow rings, earrings, and a sleeveless shirt, which revealed his abundance of tattoos.

The girl with the spiked orange hair and ragged cut-off shorts glared at the boy, her arms folded in front of her breasts. As Harper drew near, she looked at him. Hello.

Hi, Harper returned.  He slowed to a walk, panting.

How ya doin’? she asked.

Fine, said Harper. How are you tonight?

He knew that he was being excessively polite, but he wanted to look into her eyes. He could usually tell by the eyes. If she were one of them, she would do more than merely glance at him.

Oh, I’m great, she said with heavy sarcasm.

Now she hardly looked at him. She had no agenda but to make some sort of point with her boyfriend.  She was human, like the girl on the bridge with greenish-blue eyes.

Harper started jogging again, picking up his pace.

Red-and-blue neon beer signs that hung in a bar window leaped out of the darkness.  Beneath them stood a group of fifty-something motorcyclists—dismounting, lighting cigarettes, nodding to their friends who were already inside the Charybdis Club. A lot of bikers met at this bar in Star-Cross Corners, but only the younger ones would roar down the street in front of his apartment building at 3:00 am, jarring him awake by rattling the windows.

On the sidewalk near one of the wrought-iron benches, weighed down with weapons and communications devices, stood baby-faced officers from the mini-precinct office that had been recently located in one of the plaza store-fronts.  Merchants had demanded the presence of police to keep a vigil for shoplifters, vandalism, drug deals, and thefts from parked cars, so the plaza area had looked cleaner for a while.  However, many of the unkempt drifters who had sprawled around the small trees before the small fences had been erected now merely lounged on the benches, still begging tourists for spare change. Nighttime thefts from parked cars still occurred, and even during daylight hours, it was not unusual to see a store manager huffing and puffing through parking lots as he pursued a petty thief.

A bulky man with pure white hair and bulging, faded blue jeans thrust a counter-culture newspaper into Harper’s face.

Harper broke his stride but shook his head. Don’t carry money when I jog.  He looked into the man’s eyes.

The vendor was human, his blood-shot eyes blinking at Harper as if he didn’t believe him.

Harper didn’t care.

These newspapers were free. The homeless inhabitants of Star-Cross Corners, like this man Harper had seen around the area for years, took them out of the small vending stands and tried to sell them to visitors.

Only once had Harper bought a paper from him. Seeing that it was a free-distribution newspaper and feeling like a sucker, Harper had mailed it to Floyd back in Illinois as a curio representing the neighborhood.

An advertisement in another free-distribution newspaper, stuffed weekly into rickety news boxes throughout Atlanta, had declared that the clientele of a particular Star-Cross Corners bar were part of the attraction.

In Harper’s opinion, this was true of most of the stores, bars, and restaurants in The Corners.

Goths, who had frequented many of these establishments for years, were diminishing in number. Harper was almost sorry to see this because, of the many groups or cliques hovering around the area, the pasty-faced, white-armed, sunken-eyed young women and men who wore black clothing and avoided daylight hours like characters from Bram Stoker were the least threatening but the most fascinating.

However, they would also be the perfect cover for the stillborn creatures that he and his friend had brought to this world: the pontianak, the Malaysian term. In Indonesia, according to Lina Wibisono, it was the kuntilanak.

Star-Cross Corners had many establishments for the separate groups to visit, many alternatives to the yuppie bars and pizza parlors. Among these were two Indian restaurants, a soul vegetarian restaurant, a Jamaican restaurant, a Cajon-Creole restaurant, and two coffee shops. Harper’s gaze took in other businesses along the sides of the triangle park: a New Age crystal and candle shop; a used furniture store; a Futon store; a vintage clothing store; an art-and-frame gallery; and shops that, separately, sold African, Native American, and Celtic art and jewelry. Some of these businesses opened, thrived, and expanded to larger facilities; others closed after a short tenure, only to be replaced by newer shops and bars.

As Harper jogged past the Volkswagen garage where he often left his VW for repair work, he looked to see if any of the fellows were working late. They were, but he didn’t want to talk to any of them tonight. He continued running past the yogurt and smoothie shop, past the natural health-food co-op, past the live-theater playhouses, past the camper and bicycle store, and past the bookstore that specialized in counter-culture literature of the 1950s and 60s.

A slender black man in an Army-green shirt stood hunched forward in a narrow alley, holding a cellular phone to his ear with his left hand and smoking a cigarette with his right. A gust blew cigarette embers into his face. Shit! He dropped the cigarette and had to scramble to prevent the phone from following it. Then he saw Harper, turned away, and resumed speaking into the phone.

Harper understood. Every inhabitant of The Corners, from panhandlers to shop owners, had an image to maintain.

When Harper approached and jogged past an international jewelry and furniture store, it didn’t surprise him that he thought only about the fact that they featured large beds and chairs from Indonesia. It didn’t surprise him that the furniture made him think of his dead girl friend.

Near the corner were the pumps of a brightly lit gas station and convenience store. Harper bought gas here so that he could step inside the small building and keep current on neighborhood events by chatting with Jeff Andrzej, the store manager who watched the interior and exterior of the store through the surveillance cameras. On more than one occasion, Jeff had materialized outside the store to scare off panhandlers who bothered Harper when he was trying to fill his Volkswagen. Jeff had a pugilistic nature and would go to court to testify against someone who had pocketed as little as a candy bar.

Harper waited for the white WALK light to flash on before he crossed the six lanes of Melrose Avenue.

The four-story beige building that included Harper’s apartment dwarfed the Zin-go’s fast-food stand next to it on the corner. A customer, swinging his aircraft carrier of an old car into one of the designated parking places, honked at him. Harper looked to see if he knew the driver but quickly realized that the customer had only honked because Harper, jogging on the sidewalk, was in his way. He had been honked at many times by motorists when he had been riding his bike, even when he had been riding off to the side and away from the flow of traffic, but rarely did he earn the bleat of a car horn when jogging on the sidewalk.

For a moment, Harper pictured himself being found dead on the sidewalk, and he wondered, since he wasn’t carrying any identification, if whoever found him would be able to figure out who he was. How long would he have to remain as a John Doe before Jeff from the Food-Park convenience store or Erik from the top-floor apartment in his building came to identify his body?

Fantasize your own death, he thought. Escape the guilt you feel for helping draw them here: to this country, to this state, to this city.

Harper glanced at the line-up of customers inside Zin-go’s to see if he recognized anyone. He often did this when running or walking by but didn’t really know why. Maybe one of his neighbors in the apartment building would be buying fried food the way Harper occasionally did when he was too lazy to cook.

He ran up the short flight of steps to the door of the apartment building and stared at the security lock on the front door. He thought about the three-digit code number as he jogged in place. Before he could open the door, he saw, at the corner of his vision, a pulsating red light.

He looked east along the street, curious about the source of the light.

A short distance down the block, parked against the curb with its red emergency flashers blinking, was the car that belonged to the two women who rented the apartment next to his. They were moving out. They’d given their notice. On a recent Sunday afternoon, the screen of their porch on the alley side of the building had been ripped open and numerous belongings hauled away in a moving van. Last January, someone had broken the rear passenger window of Harper’s VW and taken a small tool kit that was about the size of a laptop computer.

However, within six months or so, they would all have to be moving out anyway. The owner had recently sold the building, built in 1929, to a construction firm that intended to sell each of the twelve units as condos. Each had been given notice that while the current leases would be honored, they would not be renewed. They were, on the other hand, invited to purchase the unit where they lived.

He glanced at the balcony to make sure that nothing was lurking there. It was just above the head-level of any pedestrians walking on the cracked sidewalk in front of it, but a determined thief could gain access to it on the alley side by climbing the small bluff where the former landlords had planted flowers. It looked empty, so he tapped in the code and turned the doorknob.

He locked his apartment door behind him. The bureau, he saw, stood against the south wall of the large, shadow-strewn living room. He tossed his keys onto the top of the bureau, leaned down to press his shoulder against it, and shoved it to block the door.

That night, Harper slept very little. He tossed and turned and pounded the pillow. It was like the old days, as he called them, those horrible days back in the mid-west when the long journey into the dark tunnel was just beginning—and the thought of going through all of those panic attacks and bleak episodes in the bottomless pit angered him.

Door . . ..

He saw a door moving toward him. As it grew nearer, it became a doorway. Thurisaz.

He remembered what his friend Adonio, a rune stone reader, had told him about Thurisaz representing doorways.

Harper became like a fly on the wall, looking down at the doorway. It was an extreme angle. The doorway was distorted from his new perspective; it didn’t look rectangular but a strange new geometric shape.

He moved closer to it, crawling downward to reach it.

Grayish-green light streamed through the keyhole. With the dull light came voices, and the echoes of words appeared as abstract shapes and vague images. He knew that he was dreaming because each echo was repeated as an extended reverberation of each spoken word.

The ancient doorknob was square –- not real -– more like a drawing, older than any date he could imagine.  The door opened. The voices were louder, but the words were still unclear.

He squinted into the brilliant Mediterranean sunlight and cringed as sounds of squawking wooden wheels and chattering shoppers assaulted his ears. It was a marketplace, an agora, filled with merchants and traders, shopkeepers and soldiers. Immediately to his right as he stepped through the doorway was a flimsy wooden chariot like those he had seen in many Italian film spectaculars.

An armored soldier carrying a circular shield and heavy spear pulled himself up into the horse-drawn vehicle. He glared at Harper, then pulled on the reins to turn the horses away and lashed at them until they jerked the vehicle forward. They snorted and fought against the strain, but the warrior lashed at them again. They pawed at the wide hillock of dirt that led down to a flattened street of dirt and sand.  The creaking chariot sped away, leaving a brownish cloud in its wake.

Harper spun around. Why does this look familiar?

Beyond a dirty street sat a row of buildings that looked like an ancient version of the row of small stores in Star Cross Corners. In front of one shop-like structure, an old woman sat weaving what appeared to be a shroud.

It’s the custom, Harper.  Black for the dead.

The voice. The inflection. She was Asian.

The woman – tall, slender, lovely—tugged on his arm.

He didn’t budge. Who are you? What is an Asian person doing here?

She pulled harder until she had to jerk him away. My name is Geraldine.

That’s not an Asian name.

No. Geraldine nodded toward the horizon.

The sky, Harper noticed, was the greenish-gray he remembered from before. Only near the horizon did red streaks intermingled with purple clouds disrupt the hue.

What is it?

Night, she said. We fear the dark.

Why?

He couldn’t hear her entire answer, only the end of a word that resounded like an echo.

—ee-uhh.

He looked back and saw that people who had been working in the street were scrubbing each other with water poured from earthen jars. For a moment, they seemed to freeze into a tableau, becoming silhouettes against the crimson twilight like immortal figures etched on the rounded surface of a Grecian urn.

In her haste, a young girl, gathering up the tools of her trade and departing for an open doorway, bumped into him, pressing one bare breast against his upper arm. The look she gave him was neither one of distain nor an agreeable expression. She merely stared at him.

Yes.  He was an outsider.

He could almost feel her thoughts about him. He looked down at his sandaled feet; then he looked back at her as a queer feeling overtook him.

This girl had the same pale skin, honey-blonde hair, and greenish-blue eyes as the girl he had seen on the bridge next to the Freedom Parkway while jogging that day. She gave him the same knowing look.

Harper turned to see where she might be going, but she seemed to melt into the crowd. As he tried to sort her out from the others, a gust of wind carried dust into his face. He blinked. He cringed. He winced. Something was in his eye. He leaned over, gouging with his forefinger into his right eye, forcing tears to come forth. Damn! Damn! Damn!. My eye! One eye remained shut as he gritted his teeth and moaned. He tried to open it. This has happened before. I’ve dreamed this. But my eye feels like this is—

Geraldine was gone.  So were the other people.

Something swirled lightly in his head, toying with his consciousness, causing his knees to buckle. He fell to the street and toppled onto his side. He lay with his eyes closed; he was drained, weary, and helpless.

When he was able to see again, he realized that he stood alone in a dusty field, staring at the line of the horizon. The sky was a dusty brown, like the field, but a lighter shade. The agora was gone, and only one farmhouse, with a single tree and a silo next to a small barn, remained. He waited for what seemed like hours, but nothing else appeared.

Wooden poles resembled giant pillars holding up the heavens, higher than any poles he had ever seen. He heard a tap-tap-tapping and looked around. A woodpecker hammered away at one of the tall poles.

After a long moment, he found himself next to a creek. The water in the creek was a milky white, almost gray like liquid clay. As he watched, colors were introduced into the creek, a bizarre combination of colors that flowed together but failed to blend.

A tree branch in the water became the arm of a woman. It tore at him, and he, as airy as the gust of wind, was suddenly drifting over the brim of the bluff. The creek rose up. Swallowed him. He foundered in the multi-colored clay-like liquid.

~

Awake, he shook his head as he gasped for breath. Now only the light from his next-door neighbors seeped through the Venetian blinds to throw pale stripes onto the wall opposite his bed.