Darkness Blooms
Darkness Blooms
- A Novella -
Christopher Bloodworth
Darkness Blooms
- A Novella -
Copyright © 2015 by Christopher Bloodworth
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.
Cover art by Rofik Achmad
Cover design by Christopher Bloodworth
Interior design by Christopher Bloodworth
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For Stephanie.
OTHER BLOODWORTH TITLES
HANDBOOK FOR A TEENAGE ANTICHRIST
BEDTIME STORIES FOR THE DAMNED
BOOTHWORLD INDUSTRIES EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS
Table of Contents
Book 1 of the Armageddon Trilogy
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The last call Sylvia ever received took place on February seventeenth.
Sylvia tapped the screen of her cell and answered. “Hello?”
“Sylly?” The voice on the other end of the line asked.
Sylvia could’ve picked that voice out of a crowded train station even if it hadn’t used her old nickname.
“Mamere?” Sylvia asked back. She sat down at her desk and looked up at the map of Louisiana above her desk, tracing the roads that led from New Orleans to Dyson Ditch.
“You know it’s me,” Mamere said. “Voice ain’t changed at all. Yours has dropped a fair bit, eh?”
Sylvia rolled her eyes.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” Mamere said from the other end of the phone.
It was always disconcerting how easily her step-grandmother could pinpoint exactly what she was doing without having eyes on Sylvia.
Sylvia sighed. “Sorry.”
“Your Papere is gone.”
And there it was.
Plain and simple.
Sylvia had no living relatives now. She was the only Crawstow remaining. Some might say that Mamere counted as she’d been the only mother Sylvia ever had, but Mamere wasn’t blood, and no matter what anyone bullshitted, that mattered.
Of course it did.
Family history was built on the bodies of ancestors.
Blood
ancestors.
“In his sleep?” Sylvia asked, shaking her head even as the question spilled out.
Of course it hadn’t been in his sleep.
“No,” Mamere said. “Don’t be a couyon, girl. He disappeared like I told you he would when you was little.”
Family history.
Sylvia still remembered the tears that poured down her face when her step-grandmother sat her down to tell her that her grandfather would disappear when she was a grown woman. She hadn’t really thought much about it though. It wasn’t the sort of thing you expected to come true.
“How long has he been missing?” Sylvia asked even though she already knew the answer.
“Year,” Mamere said.
“A whole year and you’re just now calling me?”
Mamere snorted from the other end of the phone.
“So...” Sylvia’s voice fell off. She was about to ask when the funeral was, but what did you do when someone disappeared. Did you even have a funeral?
“There was no will, but you can come get anything of his that you want.”
“When?” Sylvia asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Sylvia asked. “I have work tomorrow. What about this weekend?”
“I’m leaving early tomorrow morning. Back to Baton Rouge for me.”
“What’s happening to the house?”
“Already sold. Come by tomorrow or not at all. I’ll be gone and all of his stuff will be there. Key’s in the same place. Good luck, girl.”
There was a click from Mamere’s end of the phone.
Sylvia rolled into Greyson the next morning around 7 AM, but something felt wrong about the town. It felt empty.
There were cars parked on either side of the road, but none of the lights in any of the businesses were on. None of the restaurants were open for breakfast. No one walked on the sidewalks.
Sylvia didn’t like it. Thankfully, her grandparents lived on the outskirts of the town.
She looked at the GPS on her cell to make sure that she was actually in Greyson.
She was.
Sylvia kept driving, trying not to think about the way her hands gripped the steering wheel to keep from shaking.
The place where Sylvia had grown up was smaller than she remembered, or maybe she’d just grown to fill more of it.
“How did I ever live here?”
Her apartment had more square footage than this house by a long shot.
The steps leading up to the front porch sagged, and when she stepped on the first one, it groaned. Thoughts of her leg plunging through a cracked board with rusty nails sticking out came to mind, but Sylvia pushed that thought from her head and kept going. Each step groaned louder than the last and when she finally stepped onto the front porch, the destination of supposed safety, the boards bowed under her weight.
Sylvia continued to the front door and fished the key out from behind the old shingle where they’d always kept it. Faded blue paint flaked off onto her fingers as she put the shingle back.
The floor inside the house was better, studier. The rooms all had the same dead perfume smell that they’d always had, only now they were empty. Sylvia walked through the old house, breathing in the old smells of her childhood. She walked room to room, lingering longer in some than others as memories rolled over her.
Papere’s stuff was all still in the bedroom he shared with Mamere, although it felt like a stranger’s things without her Mamere’s stuff beside it all.
Sylvia went straight for the desk in the corner. That held the thing she wanted, assuming Mamere hadn’t changed her mind or just lied outright and had taken something of Papere’s back to Baton Rouge with her.
Pulling open the middle drawer, Sylvia smiled.
The book was there.
Alone in the dark.
Hers.
A memory came to mind of sitting on Papere’s knee as he wrote. She couldn’t read at the time, but there had been drawings and maps in addition to the quick, clipped letters that made up Papere’s handwriting.
Sylvia pulled the book out, smiling. It was a leather bound book dyed a green so dark that it almost looked black. When she pushed on the cover, it gave way under her fingertips, then pressed back against the indentations her fingers left, like it had that expensive Swedish foam stuff just beneath the surface of the dark leather.
She opened the cover of the book, smiling at the antique key she’d watched her Papere draw. Color more like. The whole page was black, and in a black a shade lighter than the rest of the page was an antique key. It had taken Papere several weeks to draw that. She remembered sitting on his knee, listening to his wallet chain clink against the wooden chair as he worked, watching as he brought the pen to the top of the page and drew a line straight down the page vertically. He would let out his breath after every stroke, as if he’d been holding it. He pressed so hard on the paper, the tendons in his hands standing out like cables that sometimes Sylvia thought the paper would tear or the tip of his pen would snap off.
When he got to the key, he kept almost the same pressure on the paper, only letting up a tiny bit when he got to the place where the key was, then he’d go right back to full pressure.
She remembered watching as the image took shape over the weeks. On his knee as he drew the final downward stroke on the page, she’d let out a sigh too, but what happened next scared her.
“One,” Papere had said under his breath. “Seventeen to go.”
He brought his pen to the left and started from the beginning, pressing the pen down into the paper on the left most side of the page and carving downwards, retracing his first line.
Sylvia never sat in his lap again after that.
She did go in to watch him from time to time.
It took a year for him to finish his eighteen passes on the page.
After that, he closed the book, put it in the drawer where she’d just pulled from, and never opened it or talked of it again.
He’d done that cover page after the rest of the book was filled with words and images, and now the book was hers.
Sylvia sighed, closing the book and tucking it under her arm. She started walking back out of the house when another thought occurred to her.
The greenhouse.
Her grandfather had collected orchids at one time, keeping them in a tiny greenhouse he’d built himself behind the house.
Sylvia set the book down on the kitchen counter as she walked to the back of the house. Opening the door onto the back porch, Sylvia stepped out and frowned.
Scattered around the backyard were several black mounds. Sylvia counted them off. 18 total.
From the porch, the black mounds looked like piles of burnt rags. Encircling each mound was a perfect circle of pristine soil, almost as if the grass had shrunk back, or as if—Sylvia voiced her thought aloud, “Something burned it.”
That seemed to make more sense, but not enough sense for Sylvia. She walked over to the mound closest to the stairs and crouched down.
The mounds weren’t burnt rags at all. Each was covered in dusky, black flowers. Hundreds of them, none larger than a quarter. Each bloom was twisted closed, shiny black veins crisscrossing the dull black petals.
Sylvia had never seen anything like it.
