The Quality of Darkness

By Stefon Mears

A six-story office building in downtown Portland, Oregon. A great place to work. A terrible place to be alone. At night. When the lights go out.

A worse place to be when a scream breaks the silence.

"The Quality of Darkness" – a dark fantasy tale featuring a malevolent supernatural creature and a clever businessman. If you like dark deals, don't miss this short story! From Stefon Mears, author of The House on Cedar Street and The Right Kind of Stake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thousand Faces Publishing
• Release date: Feb 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386565277

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The Quality of Darkness

The Quality of Darkness

Stefon Mears

Thousand Faces Publishing

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Also by Stefon Mears

The dark is never just one thing. Take my bedroom, for example. Even in the middle of the night, my bedroom never really got pitch black, despite some pretty good curtains. More like the kind of dim grayness that reduced the world to colorless shapes, pinged with little shines of pale green or red from the satellite box, or my phone charger. That kind of thing.

When the lights went out in that office building, my bedroom was the first thing I thought about. First, because I would rather have been there. Even alone, I would rather have been there. Safe, and comfortable. Maybe even getting a good night’s sleep, for once.

All right, I didn’t get as far as imagining a good night’s sleep. I’ve got the kind of mind that never stops running. Just sort of slows to a quick march for a few hours a night.

But the moment the lights went out I was kicking myself for being in the six story office building where I worked in downtown Portland, rather than in my comfortable bedroom.

Stupid mistake, really. Supposed to fly PDX to SJC tomorrow for a convention in Santa Clara, California. Great place to make contacts and maybe a few sales. But — tough to do any of that without my ticket.

In this day and age when I could have had my boarding pass on my phone, I had to deal with a paper ticket. Because that was the kind of office manager Zeke was.

Some people believed in the paperless office. Zeke