Post by ajmacready on Nov 3, 2015 15:51:18 GMT -5
I recently released the first in a three-part book series I call Descendent Darkness. The second book will be released this week, and the third by December. This series represents an old-school approach to the vampire tale, so if Twilight or From Dusk 'Til Dawn is your thing, you will probably not enjoy this. This series will likely have the most appeal for those who grew up before the 90s or who simply appreciate the classic treatment of the genre.
Here is the link for the Kindle edition, which will be free for the rest of this week (November 3-November 8): Descendent Darkness: Book One: Stirrings
The following is a sample:
***
Here is the link for the Kindle edition, which will be free for the rest of this week (November 3-November 8): Descendent Darkness: Book One: Stirrings
The following is a sample:
***
The Clarke’s Summit Murders
If the name Clarke’s Summit sounds familiar, think back to the spring of 1982, and you may remember hearing about a series of bizarre disappearances and slayings that laid siege to the northern portion of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley for ten days. During that short span of time, nine local residents vanished and seven others were found dead. Investigators failed to turn up any solid leads as to the identity of the person or persons responsible for these crimes, and none of the missing persons were ever found.
Originally established as ‘Gaston’ in 1769, Clarke’s Summit seems, on its surface, like any other small Appalachian village. Most residents in this community of just over six hundred souls can trace their ancestry to families who have lived in northwestern Virginia for over a century. Some are even direct descendants of the town’s original founders. They form a proud, close-knit community. They are primarily poor or lower middle class, but they ask no sympathy and make no apology. Despite the town’s relative poverty, there is a wealth of tradition and history there, running as deep and sure beneath the town’s people as the bedrock underlying their rolling, forested mountains.
Yet in spite of its comfortable, homespun, almost clichéd rural image, a cloud hangs over Clarke’s Summit: the darkness of a superstitious fear that casts its shadow across more than two centuries.
Why do I speak of a shadow stretching across two centuries when the horror I referenced earlier took place in 1982? For the simple reason that 1982 was not the first time Clarke’s Summit was visited by an instance of such remarkable violence and tragedy. No, for that first occurrence one would have to travel back to the year 1774; and the records from that time, while sparse, provide us with a glimpse into events that are uncomfortably similar to those of 1982. Most of those few who have investigated these matters to any degree, dismiss the striking similarities between the two events as mere coincidence, although when pressed they’ll go so far as to concede the use of the word odd. And if you ask them directly whether there might be any connection between the two events and certain aspects of local legend, they’ll favor you with a tolerant smile and politely suggest that the answer lies firmly within the realm of “rational” explanations.
That’s easy enough for the skeptics to say; but I wonder: how many of them have been up to Signal Hill at night? How many of them have felt the gaze of unseen eyes on their backs, and heard the hushed but unmistakable tones of human voices whispering in the heavy darkness atop that rise?
Where were the skeptics and their comforting platitudes when, during that hateful spring of 1982, at seven years of age, I sat huddled with my grandfather in the early morning darkness, listening to the voices of my parents—both of whom had died in an automobile accident one year previously—calling to us from the other side of a locked front door? Their voices had roused me from sleep, asking to be let in, telling me how good it would be to hold me and kiss me again, to hold and kiss Grandma and Grandpa, too. They had come back as angels, they said, and were waiting outside for me to let them in.
Overjoyed, I remember jumping out of bed and hurrying to the door, being careful not to awaken my grandparents—not just yet!—as the voices carefully instructed. My hand was on the doorknob when my grandfather, his eyes filled with the purest form of terror I have ever seen in a human expression, snatched me away from it and implored the voices to leave. “Don’t be scared,” I remember telling him. “They’re angels now.”
But my grandfather held me close and rebuked the voice that sounded so much like my dead father.
“You’re not my son!” Grandpa moaned, over and again in response to whatever waited on the other side of the door.
There was a pause, and then we heard the sound of quiet, mocking laughter coming from out there in the night. There was no genuine humor in that sound, nothing at all of the father and mother I had known and loved so dearly, no spark of what even a child could recognize as essential humanity. It was how darkness itself might laugh if it had a voice.
I knew then that I had been deceived, and I huddled closer to my grandfather as that cruel knowledge descended upon me like a shroud. I remember looking up at him and seeing his tear-streaked face. I remember how his wrinkled hands shook as he held me. And I remember what the voices said after that:
In my father’s voice: “You win tonight, old man.”
In my mother’s voice: “But there will be other nights.”
A dream? A fantasy? Was I just a poor little boy who had lost his parents and so desperately wanted to see them again that I manufactured the incident in my subconscious, turned my emotional turmoil into a nightmare?
That would be the most rational explanation, wouldn’t it? I can hear a guest psychiatrist waxing eloquent about it on a TV program or a radio call-in show as I write this. And once again, suggestions of any other solution: like maybe the incident literally took place as reported, would be dismissed with that same old tolerant smile, that same old polite affirmation of reason over superstition and fear, and that same old recommendation for a good therapist or a long trip away from it all.
Man prides himself on his search for truth, but I note the curious fact that this search takes place only within certain narrow parameters. We’re very rigid about our intellectual flexibility, and we’re especially prone to disbelief in unpleasant concepts. If I took ten people aside and told them that my parents did come to my doorstep as angels when I was a child, many more of those people would be predisposed to believe that sort of story than the one I’ve just told you. The concept of angels is all fine and dandy for most people because the implication is that there are good forces out there, and they’re watching out for us, particularly despondent little children.
But the concept of evil forces? No, that’s much less acceptable because the implications are far more sinister.
Accordingly, the general consensus among my test group of ten would likely be that what my grandfather and I heard was irrational, impossible. It didn’t really happen at all, at least not as I remember it. We heard something else that night. Maybe it was the wind, or perhaps a prankster having a laugh at our expense—case closed.
If you insist.
But I still grow cold when I think of what irrational, impossible things those who died and disappeared in Clarke’s Summit that year might have seen or heard or imagined before they passed so abruptly and mysteriously from this life.
My grandparents are gone now, and the currents of life have long since swept me far from my boyhood in the valley of Virginia, but every once in awhile I feel myself overcome with an unaccountable need to return. I last did so when I was asked to contribute this tidbit for the book you’re now reading. I wanted to go back and get the feel of the place again, you understand.
Clarke’s Summit and its people have changed in some inevitable ways since I was a child. Time marches on, as they say. The modern world intrudes whether we welcome it or not. But in many ways the past and present get along rather amiably in this small town. It still closely resembles the little town I grew up in, and I found that I really hadn’t lost the feel of it at all. Maybe I was only hoping that I had. Maybe I wanted to find that Clarke’s Summit is just a poor little mountain town filled with everyday American country folk who know nothing of superstition aside from what they read in dime store novels or import from Hollywood’s cinematic dreamers. But when I rounded the final curve of Highway 55, ducked beneath the old railroad bridge with its flaking battleship gray paint and thumb-sized rivets, and emerged into what passes for downtown, my hope for a rational conversion experience fell like an elevator dropping from penthouse to basement with its cable cut.
The town, the land itself, seemed as if it remembered me. I don’t know any other way to say it. That may seem like a poor excuse coming from a writer—after all, we work with words for a living, don’t we? But you can’t work with words that don’t exist, and I don’t know of any that adequately encapsulate the feeling I experienced that day. Asking me to describe it further would be like asking a painter to paint without his oils; it can’t be done.
While in town, I visited with some of the folks that I used to see on a daily basis while I was growing up, many of whom are now getting well along in years. Later, when I was ready, I stood in front of my grandfather’s old single-story home on Pleasant Valley Road and stared at the front door, its once bright paint now faded, and I wondered about what my grandfather and I once faced from the other side of that thin barrier of Virginia oak. What I had nearly invited to cross our threshold. What had wanted to hold me and kiss me.
Lastly, and most reluctantly, I went back up to Signal Hill. I walked to the monument that stands there in memory of those that were lost to us in 1982: a small town’s way of coping with a tragedy that would frighten a big city, and I looked across the mountains to where the sun rode low and red beneath a ridge of thick clouds. I tried to maintain my clinical detachment, tried to set aside the memories of my childhood and compose myself like a properly enlightened twenty-first century man. But as the sun sank lower and the shadows grew longer, seeming almost as if they reached for me from the pages of some dark storybook fantasy, I became aware of what I can only describe as a presence, similar to the skin-prickling sensation that being watched evokes in most of us. I turned to look over my shoulder, thinking that someone else might have driven up to take advantage of the spectacular mountain twilight. I should have known better. Hardly anyone goes up to Signal Hill. Not even teenagers looking for some quiet, secluded place to make-out.
It appeared that I was alone; and yet I knew very well that I was not. I was in the spectral company of a growing presence I had last felt as a child, huddled with my grandfather in a pool of moonlight behind a locked door. It was a warm June evening, but the air around me suddenly seemed to have turned wintry. My resolve failed. I felt that I had to get out of there before I heard the voices again, taunting me, welcoming me home, inviting me to remain until after darkness had fallen.
So I did. I got back in my car and I drove away as quickly as the narrow road down the mountain would permit, praying that I hadn’t lingered too long, my impromptu test of rationality a decided failure on at least two counts. I had succumbed to fear.
Be that as it may. I admit it freely. Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that there are certain situations in which fear is the rational response. Fear stops us in mid-stride when we hear the rattle of a coiled snake in the brush somewhere along the path where we’re walking. Fear prompts us to install security systems in order to protect loved ones and guard cherished belongings. And once, a long time ago now, fear led a grandfather to snatch his young grandson’s hand away from a brass doorknob as if it were a hot stove, before the child could unwittingly admit something evil into their presence.
You rationalists and skeptics out there will undoubtedly find all of this very amusing. Well, you go ahead and have your laugh. Go on and get it out of your system, as my grandmother used to say.
But for those of you for whom the universe holds unlimited possibilities, I’ll pass along a bit of my grandfather’s advice. If you’re ever near Clarke’s Summit, Virginia, stay off of the back roads at night, and away from Signal Hill in particular. If you feel the wind pick up, and it feels colder than it should, get inside. Draw the curtains. Bolt the door, and for your mother’s sake don’t open it again until you see the sun, no matter who or what you might hear.
The shadow lingers in Clarke’s Summit, dormant perhaps, but still very much alive. I think it’s waiting; and although I can’t say what it might be waiting for, I feel certain that its time will come around again.
Because I remember that voice. I remember the quiet, mocking laughter of darkness and the promise it made with such cold certitude.
“There will be other nights.”
Phillip Drexler
San Antonio, TX
July, 2002
If the name Clarke’s Summit sounds familiar, think back to the spring of 1982, and you may remember hearing about a series of bizarre disappearances and slayings that laid siege to the northern portion of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley for ten days. During that short span of time, nine local residents vanished and seven others were found dead. Investigators failed to turn up any solid leads as to the identity of the person or persons responsible for these crimes, and none of the missing persons were ever found.
Originally established as ‘Gaston’ in 1769, Clarke’s Summit seems, on its surface, like any other small Appalachian village. Most residents in this community of just over six hundred souls can trace their ancestry to families who have lived in northwestern Virginia for over a century. Some are even direct descendants of the town’s original founders. They form a proud, close-knit community. They are primarily poor or lower middle class, but they ask no sympathy and make no apology. Despite the town’s relative poverty, there is a wealth of tradition and history there, running as deep and sure beneath the town’s people as the bedrock underlying their rolling, forested mountains.
Yet in spite of its comfortable, homespun, almost clichéd rural image, a cloud hangs over Clarke’s Summit: the darkness of a superstitious fear that casts its shadow across more than two centuries.
Why do I speak of a shadow stretching across two centuries when the horror I referenced earlier took place in 1982? For the simple reason that 1982 was not the first time Clarke’s Summit was visited by an instance of such remarkable violence and tragedy. No, for that first occurrence one would have to travel back to the year 1774; and the records from that time, while sparse, provide us with a glimpse into events that are uncomfortably similar to those of 1982. Most of those few who have investigated these matters to any degree, dismiss the striking similarities between the two events as mere coincidence, although when pressed they’ll go so far as to concede the use of the word odd. And if you ask them directly whether there might be any connection between the two events and certain aspects of local legend, they’ll favor you with a tolerant smile and politely suggest that the answer lies firmly within the realm of “rational” explanations.
That’s easy enough for the skeptics to say; but I wonder: how many of them have been up to Signal Hill at night? How many of them have felt the gaze of unseen eyes on their backs, and heard the hushed but unmistakable tones of human voices whispering in the heavy darkness atop that rise?
Where were the skeptics and their comforting platitudes when, during that hateful spring of 1982, at seven years of age, I sat huddled with my grandfather in the early morning darkness, listening to the voices of my parents—both of whom had died in an automobile accident one year previously—calling to us from the other side of a locked front door? Their voices had roused me from sleep, asking to be let in, telling me how good it would be to hold me and kiss me again, to hold and kiss Grandma and Grandpa, too. They had come back as angels, they said, and were waiting outside for me to let them in.
Overjoyed, I remember jumping out of bed and hurrying to the door, being careful not to awaken my grandparents—not just yet!—as the voices carefully instructed. My hand was on the doorknob when my grandfather, his eyes filled with the purest form of terror I have ever seen in a human expression, snatched me away from it and implored the voices to leave. “Don’t be scared,” I remember telling him. “They’re angels now.”
But my grandfather held me close and rebuked the voice that sounded so much like my dead father.
“You’re not my son!” Grandpa moaned, over and again in response to whatever waited on the other side of the door.
There was a pause, and then we heard the sound of quiet, mocking laughter coming from out there in the night. There was no genuine humor in that sound, nothing at all of the father and mother I had known and loved so dearly, no spark of what even a child could recognize as essential humanity. It was how darkness itself might laugh if it had a voice.
I knew then that I had been deceived, and I huddled closer to my grandfather as that cruel knowledge descended upon me like a shroud. I remember looking up at him and seeing his tear-streaked face. I remember how his wrinkled hands shook as he held me. And I remember what the voices said after that:
In my father’s voice: “You win tonight, old man.”
In my mother’s voice: “But there will be other nights.”
A dream? A fantasy? Was I just a poor little boy who had lost his parents and so desperately wanted to see them again that I manufactured the incident in my subconscious, turned my emotional turmoil into a nightmare?
That would be the most rational explanation, wouldn’t it? I can hear a guest psychiatrist waxing eloquent about it on a TV program or a radio call-in show as I write this. And once again, suggestions of any other solution: like maybe the incident literally took place as reported, would be dismissed with that same old tolerant smile, that same old polite affirmation of reason over superstition and fear, and that same old recommendation for a good therapist or a long trip away from it all.
Man prides himself on his search for truth, but I note the curious fact that this search takes place only within certain narrow parameters. We’re very rigid about our intellectual flexibility, and we’re especially prone to disbelief in unpleasant concepts. If I took ten people aside and told them that my parents did come to my doorstep as angels when I was a child, many more of those people would be predisposed to believe that sort of story than the one I’ve just told you. The concept of angels is all fine and dandy for most people because the implication is that there are good forces out there, and they’re watching out for us, particularly despondent little children.
But the concept of evil forces? No, that’s much less acceptable because the implications are far more sinister.
Accordingly, the general consensus among my test group of ten would likely be that what my grandfather and I heard was irrational, impossible. It didn’t really happen at all, at least not as I remember it. We heard something else that night. Maybe it was the wind, or perhaps a prankster having a laugh at our expense—case closed.
If you insist.
But I still grow cold when I think of what irrational, impossible things those who died and disappeared in Clarke’s Summit that year might have seen or heard or imagined before they passed so abruptly and mysteriously from this life.
My grandparents are gone now, and the currents of life have long since swept me far from my boyhood in the valley of Virginia, but every once in awhile I feel myself overcome with an unaccountable need to return. I last did so when I was asked to contribute this tidbit for the book you’re now reading. I wanted to go back and get the feel of the place again, you understand.
Clarke’s Summit and its people have changed in some inevitable ways since I was a child. Time marches on, as they say. The modern world intrudes whether we welcome it or not. But in many ways the past and present get along rather amiably in this small town. It still closely resembles the little town I grew up in, and I found that I really hadn’t lost the feel of it at all. Maybe I was only hoping that I had. Maybe I wanted to find that Clarke’s Summit is just a poor little mountain town filled with everyday American country folk who know nothing of superstition aside from what they read in dime store novels or import from Hollywood’s cinematic dreamers. But when I rounded the final curve of Highway 55, ducked beneath the old railroad bridge with its flaking battleship gray paint and thumb-sized rivets, and emerged into what passes for downtown, my hope for a rational conversion experience fell like an elevator dropping from penthouse to basement with its cable cut.
The town, the land itself, seemed as if it remembered me. I don’t know any other way to say it. That may seem like a poor excuse coming from a writer—after all, we work with words for a living, don’t we? But you can’t work with words that don’t exist, and I don’t know of any that adequately encapsulate the feeling I experienced that day. Asking me to describe it further would be like asking a painter to paint without his oils; it can’t be done.
While in town, I visited with some of the folks that I used to see on a daily basis while I was growing up, many of whom are now getting well along in years. Later, when I was ready, I stood in front of my grandfather’s old single-story home on Pleasant Valley Road and stared at the front door, its once bright paint now faded, and I wondered about what my grandfather and I once faced from the other side of that thin barrier of Virginia oak. What I had nearly invited to cross our threshold. What had wanted to hold me and kiss me.
Lastly, and most reluctantly, I went back up to Signal Hill. I walked to the monument that stands there in memory of those that were lost to us in 1982: a small town’s way of coping with a tragedy that would frighten a big city, and I looked across the mountains to where the sun rode low and red beneath a ridge of thick clouds. I tried to maintain my clinical detachment, tried to set aside the memories of my childhood and compose myself like a properly enlightened twenty-first century man. But as the sun sank lower and the shadows grew longer, seeming almost as if they reached for me from the pages of some dark storybook fantasy, I became aware of what I can only describe as a presence, similar to the skin-prickling sensation that being watched evokes in most of us. I turned to look over my shoulder, thinking that someone else might have driven up to take advantage of the spectacular mountain twilight. I should have known better. Hardly anyone goes up to Signal Hill. Not even teenagers looking for some quiet, secluded place to make-out.
It appeared that I was alone; and yet I knew very well that I was not. I was in the spectral company of a growing presence I had last felt as a child, huddled with my grandfather in a pool of moonlight behind a locked door. It was a warm June evening, but the air around me suddenly seemed to have turned wintry. My resolve failed. I felt that I had to get out of there before I heard the voices again, taunting me, welcoming me home, inviting me to remain until after darkness had fallen.
So I did. I got back in my car and I drove away as quickly as the narrow road down the mountain would permit, praying that I hadn’t lingered too long, my impromptu test of rationality a decided failure on at least two counts. I had succumbed to fear.
Be that as it may. I admit it freely. Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that there are certain situations in which fear is the rational response. Fear stops us in mid-stride when we hear the rattle of a coiled snake in the brush somewhere along the path where we’re walking. Fear prompts us to install security systems in order to protect loved ones and guard cherished belongings. And once, a long time ago now, fear led a grandfather to snatch his young grandson’s hand away from a brass doorknob as if it were a hot stove, before the child could unwittingly admit something evil into their presence.
You rationalists and skeptics out there will undoubtedly find all of this very amusing. Well, you go ahead and have your laugh. Go on and get it out of your system, as my grandmother used to say.
But for those of you for whom the universe holds unlimited possibilities, I’ll pass along a bit of my grandfather’s advice. If you’re ever near Clarke’s Summit, Virginia, stay off of the back roads at night, and away from Signal Hill in particular. If you feel the wind pick up, and it feels colder than it should, get inside. Draw the curtains. Bolt the door, and for your mother’s sake don’t open it again until you see the sun, no matter who or what you might hear.
The shadow lingers in Clarke’s Summit, dormant perhaps, but still very much alive. I think it’s waiting; and although I can’t say what it might be waiting for, I feel certain that its time will come around again.
Because I remember that voice. I remember the quiet, mocking laughter of darkness and the promise it made with such cold certitude.
“There will be other nights.”
Phillip Drexler
San Antonio, TX
July, 2002