Shadows on The Wall

The Arrival of Darkness

CHAPTER ONE

The Arrival of Darkness

Vicky shifted her wieght in the plastic seat and stretched her arms over her head, stiff from long ride.  The train rocked and clacked beneath her as darkness whizzed by out the window, inches from her face.  

"Next stop, Collinsport!" shouted the conducter, checking his pocket watch.   

"That's my stop, I'd better get my bags down," Vicky informed the talkative old lady in a large green hat seated beside her.  She rose and began to dig around in the luggage rack, looking for her bag. 

The elderly woman appeared astonished.  "You be gettin' off at Collinsport?  Why Miss, if I was you, I'd just ride right on past it and never look back!"  Vicky stopped her search and frowned at the old person curiously.  "Why do you say that?"

"Because that place is jinxed!  Haunted! Cursed!"  She paused and leaned towards Vicky to whisper under her breath.  "The wind blows with the moans of spirits and the trees creak under the weight of secrets.  I went there once and I'll never go there again..."

"Surely you don't believe in ghosts?" Vicky admonished, resuming her efforts in the luggage rack.

"Ha!" the old lady snorted derisively.  "Not believin' in ghosts! As if you had a choice! Ha!"  She took out a compact and began to arrange her hair beneath the brim of her enormous hat.  "What on God's great green earth could entice you to go to Collinsport, anyway?  Visitin' family?"

Vicky triumphantly heaved her bag down from the rack and stared at the woman, a wistful smile playing on her lips.  "I hope so," she replied. 

Darkness was a harrowing event at Collinwood.  It crept up to the old house and slipped in through the cracks left by shadows.  It widened and lengthened and enchroached until the entire house was stifled by the aphotic hand of nightfall.  The family who lived in Collinwood felt the darkness, and they dreaded it.  For strange things happen in the dark.  Things yet to be explained.  

One of these people was a woman, and it was she who felt the darkness most acutely.  The woman was Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and she had not left Collinwood for eighteen years.    

"But Liz! You can't be serious!"  The man adressing her was hardly aware of the darkness, so consumed was he by his own affairs.

"Oh, but I am serious Roger!  This is still my house, and you cannot expect to show up on my doorstep and order me around!"

"But an outsider inside Collinwood?  It's ridiculous! It's an oxymoron! Why, ever since Jake left, we haven't--"

"Don't you dare bring him into this!"  Mrs. Stoddard turned away from the window where she had been standing and faced her brother.  

"Oh, all right, all right Liz!"  Roger walked over to the decanter and poured himself a sherry.  "I just don't understand your motives!  Why now, after all these years? David doesn't need a tutor.  I can handle him myself."  Mrs. Stoddard turned back to the window and let her eyes settle on the distant coast.  The dark, irrepressible waves pounded on the shore, as if demanding entry onto the land.  

"You know perfectly well you can't, Roger."  Her voice was softer now.  "You're aren't even trying to understand him anymore.  You ignore him most of the time, and when you do interact, you are downright rude.  David is your son, like it or not, and if you won't take responsibility for him, I will."

"He's a little monster!"  Roger gulped down his sherry and poured another.  "I've tried everything, believe me, and he is impossible to understand.  And if you think a total stranger will fair better than I have, that's fine with me!  Why, you might as well have the whole town of Collinsport come tramping through the doors and have done with it!" Roger gestured wildly and sloshed his drink onto the centuries-old carpet.