Title: A Particular Darkness
Author: Robert E.Dunn
From
the author of A Living Grave comes a gripping police procedural
featuring sheriff's detective Katrina Williams as she exposes the
dark underbelly of Appalachia . . .
Dredging
up the Truth
Still
recovering from tragedy and grieving a devastating loss, Iraq war
veteran and sheriff's detective Katrina Williams copes the only way
she knows how—by immersing herself in work. A body's just been
pulled from the lake with a fish haul, but what seems like a
straight-forward murder case over the poaching of paddlefish for
domestic caviar quickly becomes murkier than the depths of the lake.
Soon
a second body is found—an illegal Peruvian refugee woman linked to
a charismatic tent revival preacher. But as Katrina tries to
investigate the enigmatic evangelist, she is blocked by antagonistic
FBI agents and Army CID personnel. When more young female refu-gees
disappear, she must partner with deputy Billy Blevins, who stirs
mixed feelings in her, to connect the lake murder to the refugees.
Katrina is no stranger to darkness, but cold-blooded conspirators
plan to make sure she'll never again see the light of day . . .
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Excerpt:
We had lights on our helmets and a
flashlight each, but our progress was really because of Billy’s
familiarity with the path. Three turns and one crawl-through and we
came out into a chamber. At one end water dripped and trickled,
seeming to bleed right out of the stone and filled a small basin. At
the other end, the basin emptied into a silent steam that disappeared
into a fissure the size of my fist. In between was a flat space on
which we sat. Billy pointed out shapes and features in the walls and
ceiling.
“Are there bats?” I asked.
“Not all caves have bats,” he
answered without laughing or making me feel bad for asking. “But
this one has something better. Something special.”
He slipped down to his knees and put
his face low. For a second I thought he was going to put his head
under the pool of water. Instead, he shined his flashlight around
until he found what he wanted.
“Come look at this.” His voice had
become a whisper.
I joined him staring into the light
beam within the water. What, at first, I thought were reflections,
moved away from the light. Fish. They were tiny, like minnows, but
the color of bleached bone. Their eyes were small and dead looking.
It was as if I was looking into a ghost world.
“Down here.” Billy pointed with the
flashlight then poked a finger into the beam.
There, along the line of his finger was
a white rock.
“A pebble?” I asked.
“Wait.”
The rock moved and the strange shape
resolved into what appeared to be a tiny lobster.
“Crayfish,” I said excited. It was
so colorless it was practically transparent at the edges. “So
pale.”
“They don’t need color in the
darkness. They don’t need eyes either.”
I sat up, stunned and elated by the
place I was in. “Thank you,” I said looking around. “For
sharing this with me.”
“This isn’t what I wanted to
share,” Billy said.
He reached to the lamp on my hard hat
and killed the light. After a moment, he turned off my flashlight.
Again he waited a few seconds to turn off his flashlight. Finally,
after a longer pause, he turned off his own headlamp.
We were in the
kind of complete darkness I don’t think I’d ever experienced. It
was thrilling and jarring at the same time. I reached and took his
hand without even thinking. The black we were in was like distance
and I wanted to be close.
“Why?” I asked.
“Look around,” he answered, softly.
“It’s dark,” I said. “Nothing
but black.”
“There’s no light. But absence
isn’t exactly black.”
“I don’t understand.” I shook my
head then wondered why.
“Some of the guys I know . . .”
Billy said then stopped.
I knew he was talking about something
different then, but still the same. A change in subject not in
meaning. I waited, like waiting for a suspect. He had to be the one
to fill the silence.
“Veterans,” he continued. “Guys
who were over there. We talk sometimes. They talk a lot about the
things they see when they close their eyes. It’s always personal.
No one ever has the same experience or the same . . . vision on
events. Look around. Do you still see nothing?”
I did as he asked and noticed for the
first time that blackness wasn’t exactly, only blackness. There
were patterns of light, vague shimmers, not entirely seen, but not
simply imagined, I was sure.
“Something . . .” I admitted.
“Our eyes don’t like complete
darkness. When there’s no light to be seen, the optic nerves still
fire, populating the void with specters. The thing is, your eyes
won’t see what mine do and I won’t see what you experience.
Darkness is singular. What you see, is your particular darkness, no
one else’s. No matter how well you describe it, no one will see it
the way you do.”
“You’re not talking about
darkness.” I actually thought I heard fear in my voice.
“You’re holding my hand.”
“Yes,” I answered, squeezing.
“Is it real?”
“What do you mean?”
“My hand. Me. Am I real”
“Of course,” I said. “Why would
you not be?”
“That’s what I tell the other guys.
We all have our own darkness within us and sometimes it gets out, it
shadows our lives, the entire world we see. Those times we get so
wrapped up in seeing our own thing, our own darkness, we forget the
real out there beyond it.”
He let go of my hand and I was suddenly
untethered. I was adrift in my own darkness. It was a familiar
feeling. In a way, comforting. The same way what is familiar and
expected is always somehow a comfort. But I didn’t want the
darkness anymore. I realized I wanted his hand.
“Billy . . .”
He touched my face. Then the touch
became a hold as he placed his hands to each side with his fingers in
my hair. His thumb rested on the scar that framed my eye and I didn’t
mind.
“I don’t want to live in the dark
anymore,” I confessed.
Then Billy Blevins kissed me.
When we walked out of the crevasse and
entered the cave’s mouth, the world was a circle of light to be
walked into. It spread and opened as we approached. When I stepped
through, I understood what Billy had said about breathing sunshine.
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About the Author:
I wasn't born in a log cabin but the station wagon did have wood on the side. It was broken down on the approach road into Ft. Rucker, Alabama in the kind of rain that would have made a Biblical author jealous. You never saw a tornado in the Old Testament did you? As omens of a coming life go, mine was full of portent if not exactly glad tidings.
From there things got interesting. Life on a series of Army bases encouraged my retreat into a fantasy world. Life in a series of public school environments provided ample nourishment to my developing love of violence. Often heard in my home was the singular phrase, "I blame the schools." We all blamed the schools.
Both my fantasy and my academic worlds left marks and the amalgam proved useful the three times in my life I had guns pointed in my face. Despite those loving encounters the only real scars left on my body were inflicted by a six foot, seven inch tall drag queen. She didn't like the way I was admiring the play of three a.m. Waffle House fluorescent light over the high spandex sheen of her stockings.
After a series of low paying jobs that took me places no one dreams of going. I learned one thing. Nothing vomits quite so brutally as jail food. That's not the one thing I learned; it's an important thing to know, though. The one thing I learned is a secret. My secret. A terrible and dark thing I nurture in my nightmares. You learn your own lessons.
Eventually I began writing stories. Mostly I was just spilling out the, basically, true narratives of the creatures that lounge about my brain, laughing and whispering sweet, sweet things to say to women. Women see through me but enjoy the monsters in my head. They say, sometimes, that the things I say and write are lies or, "damn, filthy lies, slander of the worst kind, and the demented, perverted, wishful stories of a wasted mind." To which I always answer, I tell only the truth. I just tell a livelier truth than most people.
