The Long Fall Into Midnight Vol 1: The Long Fall Into Midnight, #1

By Erik Lynd

Fans of Twilight Zone, Dark Mirror, Ray Bradbury, and Stephen King will love these stories of suspense, horror, and dark fantasy from the author of ASYLUM and THE COLLECTION.

 

THE DYING GIRL
A dying girl with a love of the ocean. An orderly with nothing to lose and everything to gain.

 

THE HANGING TREE
When three boys from diverse backgrounds find a tree with a sordid history they learn that some trees have deep roots and mistakes of the past sometimes collide with mistakes of the present.

 

DARK ON THE WATER
A man returns to his lake home two years after the death of his wife. But something waits beyond the painful memories of the house and beneath the smooth surface of the water; something born of love, but corrupted by darkness.

 

SIEGE OF THE BONE CHILDREN
When a man loses everything, sometimes he retreats behind walls to keep out all the bad. He soon realizes sometimes you must leave a door for the good.

 

THEY EAT THEIR OWN
When an old enemy crash lands in his backyard, an ex-soldier has to choose between redemption and revenge.

 

IN THE PIT
Samuel is a prisoner, innocent to some, guilty to others. But his prison is different from any other. Here the dead have a habit of coming back to life, madness is just around the corner, and the only real escape is into hell itself.

 

DREAMS
Desire will drive a man to do many things and make many mistakes. When magic and witch's brew are involved, however, those mistakes can have undreamed of consequences.

 

HIS DEVIL
A boy's family is shaken up the night his father mysteriously abandons him and his sisters. They make a life without a father and husband until the night he returns home with a creature after him. The boy learns he must grow up quick if he is going to save his family.

 

BEING IT
When you're 'It' in a game of tag, nobody wants to be near you. It's all fun and games until the whole world wants to play.

 

PSYCHOPOMP
Del is a mortician who prides himself on his precision and compassion. But all that is tested when a corpse has one further request to make of him.

 

THE PLAYGROUND OF LOST CHILDREN
A detective, consumed with guilt, has a chance to stop an ancient evil and redeem a life of loss and heartache if only she can find the courage to overcome her deepest fear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Broken Gods Press
• Release date: Jan 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393048169

Book preview

The Long Fall Into Midnight Vol. 1

The Long Fall Into Midnight Vol. 1

Erik Lynd

Broken Gods Press

Contents

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The Dying Girl

The Hanging Tree

Dark On The Water

Siege Of The Bone Children

They Eat Their Own

In The Pit

Dreams

His Devil

Being It

Psychopomp

The Playground Of Lost Children

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Also by Erik Lynd

About the Author

For my son, Ashton.

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The Dying Girl

At first the girl wasn’t dying. She was just sleeping a lot.

Joseph knew this because he watched her. A lot. Sometimes through the glass window into the common room, where she would alternate between napping in her chair and running her fingers through the dust motes gliding through beams of sunlight. That same sunlight that made her blond hair turn to gold and her pale white skin shimmer.

Sometimes he stared at her when she walked through the cafeteria carrying a tray of food that Joseph knew would not be eaten. Just nibbled at and pushed around, thinned and formed into lumps that resembled mountains or crashing waves.

Sometimes he stared at her when she was in line for her meds. He knew her pills. Two of the white big ones and a pink one. The pink one three times a day. She didn’t fight taking the meds.

Sometimes he opened the slide to the view port of her room and watched her. She mostly slept. She had other things in her room. Books, some paints and pencils. There are not many things you can give mental patients to have in their rooms. But she rarely touched these things, especially towards the end.

She slept in her chair in the common room, dozing in and out of consciousness whenever one of the other patients made noise. But listlessly she fell back asleep most of the time. She slept in the sun when they would take her out to the garden and sit her in a lounge chair. They wanted her to play, Joseph knew. Run around like the other patients. Hit the ball, play tag maybe. But mostly she just slept.

The only thing she did as much as sleep, was stare out the window at the ocean on the other side of the hospital wall. In the common room, when not dozing in her chair, she would stand at the window, staring at the wide swath of blue. Joseph would see her move her finger around on the glass as though drawing invisible pictures on its clear surface. He could never make out what she was creating with her finger.

When she was brought to the garden, she would lift her head and breathe in the salt air as it washed over the wall. Joseph thought that when she was outside, inhaling the scent of the ocean, laying in the sun, she was as close as she could come to happy.

Joseph watched her a lot. He watched her when he worked. He had been an orderly there for almost ten years and he knew his job well. It was the same thing over and over.

The doctors, but mostly the nurses, told him what to do. He did it without question. He knew that most of them thought he was stupid, but he wasn’t. Just slower than others. He was not quick with jokes or small talk and he faded into the background often. But it did not bother him, he liked fading. It felt safe.

He watched the other patients and sometimes he would imagine he was like one of them. Quiet, peaceful. He, like them, felt trapped there. The only difference was he got to go home at night. That and the meds, he did not take medication.

Soon though, the hospital would close. He had overheard the doctors talking. Too expensive to maintain, prime piece of ocean front land, miles from any city. The nearby town of Hannity was a tourist destination. All good reasons to sell to a developer, maybe turn it into a hotel. Move the patients inland, closer to the real hospitals and cities where the doctors wanted to live.

Joseph didn’t want to live in the city.

Joseph remembered when they had first brought her a year ago. She screamed and fought. She tore at his and Tom’s arms as they dragged her in. Although the first place she was taken was not her normal room, but a padded one with a large window in the door.

Suicide watch.

Forty-eight hours later and the drugs well into her system she was released to her room. She didn’t speak or at least she rarely did. It was not a complete vow of silence, but she only spoke when there was no other choice.

He thought he might love her. Somehow. Although he had never been in love before. She was beautiful, fragile, but the way she breathed in the sea air, soaked up the sun. It made him wish she were free and that he could see what incredible things she would do outside of these walls. He had never talked to her, she had never even looked at him. Even that first day when he had to drag her to the padded room. She never noticed him.

She was dying because of him. He was certain of that. Or at least that he had begun her death. She had started to die when he had given her the shell.

On his day off Joseph wandered. Sometimes through town, sometimes along the beach. He did not know what to do with himself when not at work. So long walks seemed like a good idea. On one of these walks he found the shell. It was half the size of a football and it was beautiful. He knew nothing about shells, but it immediately caught his eye. White and polished it reminded Joseph of her skin and he knew that it was meant for her. A gift from her beloved sea.

Joseph brought it to her when she sat in the common room, sunlight warming her face. He made sure she was still awake, eyes half shut but not closed. After making sure the nurses were not watching too intently, he placed it in her lap, gently. She stirred and look down.

She held it gently in her hands turning it, tracing its delicate curves with her fingers. Joseph knew how smooth the surface was and imagined the feeling of it sliding over the skin of her fingers.

Where did you get this? She asked.

She had spoken to him. Words caught in his throat, blood pounded in his ears.

I found it on the beach, he said.

She turned it over and over in her hand.

Conch don’t live off the Oregon coast. It’s too cold.

He wasn’t sure if that was a rejection of his gift. He cleared his throat.

I found it in the sand. It made me think of you. I… I think it was meant for you, he said.

She looked at him then, for the first time. And it was as though she was trying to see deep inside him.

Thank you, she said.

She turned back to the sunlight, still rubbing the smooth shell with her delicate fingers.

She started dying after that.

The next day she came out of her room late. Moving slowly, dragging like a weight was pulling her down. She sat in her same chair in the sun, but after only an hour she pulled it away from the window and into the dark area of the room.

Joseph watched her when he could between tasks. Watched her seem to sink in on herself just a little bit, like her soul was collapsing inside of her. The next day she didn’t even bother sitting in the sun at all. She went straight to her new place in the dark of the room.

She ate even less. This concerned the doctors, but more concerning to Joseph was that she did not bother to push the food around, she did not make any shapes of mountains or seas. Already skinny she grew gaunt. She only ate when the doctors threatened hooking up an IV drip for nutrients or even force feeding her. Then she only ate enough to get them to leave her alone.

When they came to take her out to the garden she refused. When they forced her out she stayed to the shadows. Joseph no longer saw her take a deep breath of sea air or bask in the sunlight. She shied away from it and waited until the nurses decided she’d had enough and would let her go back inside.

She stopped walking. Joseph would lift her out of bed and put her in a wheel chair to move her around. He hated that, because he could feel how light she had become. She was delicate, her bones felt thin and hollow through her clothes. He would try to push her into the sunlight, but she would shrink away and roll her chair into the dark.

Joseph stopped eating also. His walks became fewer and fewer. He spent his off time sitting alone in the sunlight letting it try to warm him, all the while he wondered how she could stand the cold in the shadows.

You have to take me out of here, she croaked one day as he was moving her from her bed to the wheelchair. She had turned to look at him. Her eyes sunken as if she looked at him through a cavern. Dark, bruised skin stretched across her face.

He almost dropped her, but he was able to let her down gently before stepping back.

Joseph, she said. I can’t be here anymore.

Her mouth opened, darkened teeth shiny with spit, grimaced at him.

I thought I could, but I can’t, she said. You need to help me.

Joseph jumped back at the word need. It scared him. It screamed of risk, of losing everything. He quickly left the room.

For the first time he avoided her. Joseph went through his day, moved through his tasks like a ghost. Only paying attention to see if she was around so he could find a reason to run off to some other task. Doctors and nurses spoke to him, but he forgot what they said the moment it no longer mattered. He worked until the end of his shift and then left. It was his weekend and he didn’t have to return for a couple of days. He needed to think.

The afternoon before he had to return to work he walked again on the beach. The summer was gone and it was overcast. The sun would disappear until next spring. A long shadow was on the coast.

He was afraid for her and of her. She wanted her freedom. But it would mean change for him, great change. They wouldn’t just let her go, so the only way would destroy what little he had built for himself. He would have to leave too, throw what little was in this town for him away.

And he wondered if giving her the freedom she wanted might also kill her. But that didn’t really matter. She was already dying.

It took him a while to realize he had walked all the way up the beach and now he stood below the hospital up on the hill. He took a couple of steps back and stumbled over something on the beach.

It was another conch shell, partially buried in the sand. Not more than a few feet from it was another one and another. Joseph scanned the beach, there must have been hundreds of them scattered about.

Conch don’t live off the Oregon coast. It is too cold.

Joseph looked back up at the hospital and wondered if she was looking at him right now. He wondered if she could see the fear in his eyes.

If I get you out of here, where will you go? Joseph asked her.

She turned her head to look at him from her bed, but she did not answer. She didn’t need to. He knew, he always knew. In the distance beyond the window in her room he saw the blue-gray streak across the horizon. He would not be able to go with her.

I will take you, but we have to wait until night. It will be easier then… Joseph started.

No, we go now, she said.

It was barely a whisper, but it cut Joseph off. They could not get very far if they left in the daytime. There were too many people. They might make it out of the building, but they would be found immediately. Once again Joseph looked at the ocean on the horizon. And was reminded it didn’t matter, at least for her.

She couldn’t move. She had worsened just in the short two days he had been gone. Here skin was pulled tight against her bones making her look like a skeleton. It was as though she was drying up. He gently moved her to the wheelchair.

Wait, she said as he started to wheel her out of the room. She reached over and picked up the conch shell from the table. She slipped her hand into the hole where the animal had lived. And rested it in her lap. That simple action seemed to drain a lot of strength out of her.

Okay, let’s go.

Joseph wheeled her out into the hallway and towards the main entrance. It would not be hard to get out, his card key had full access, but it would be impossible to get out without being seen. Their only chance was to move as fast as they could and hope.

He didn’t run, that would have been too obvious, but he walked quickly passed a couple of nurses standing in the hallway fifty feet from the lobby door.

Hey! Joseph, right? Where you heading? One of the nurses called after him.

Forty feet from the door.

Hey Joe, I’m talking to you.

Twenty feet.

"Orderly!