Devils in Dark Houses Read online

  Table of Contents

  DEVILS IN

  DARK HOUSES

  Connect With Us

  The Eye That Blinds

  Part I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part II

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Each Castle its King

  Part I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part II

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Nostri

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part II

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Devils in Dark Houses

  Part I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part II

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  DEVILS IN

  DARK HOUSES

  B. E. Scully

  First Edition

  Devils In Dark Houses © 2016 by B. E. Scully

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us... It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.

  —Theodore Roosevelt

  THE EYE THAT BLINDS

  In the country of the blind,

  the one-eyed man is king.

  —H.G. Wells

  PART I

  1

  Twelve more minutes. Ross Delvin concentrated on his right leg, the one he’d been standing on for the past two hours, forty-eight minutes, and thirty-three seconds. The cramp in his foot had come and gone, or maybe his whole right side had gone numb. He tucked his left leg into the crook of his right knee and tried not to look at the timer. The whole effect was like a big naked man-crane balanced on one leg in the middle of a living room. Then again, making him look as asinine as possible was exactly what the Eye wanted.

  Ten more minutes. If the timer didn’t go off soon, Ross would either throw up or shit himself.

  The Eye stared back at him. The Eye never looked away or even blinked. The Eye saw everything, recorded everything—impassive, impervious, but not without appetites. In fact, if the Eye had one weakness, it was the hunger—never satisfied, never satiated. Always watching, always waiting for the bigger, better show.

  Seven more minutes. Ross felt his right leg begin to buckle. He held both arms out to steady himself. When the Eye had woken him up at three in the morning with the instructions to remove all of his clothing and stand on his right leg in the middle of the living room for exactly three hours and not one minute more, he knew this wasn’t the final task, the big one that would make him rich and famous. The Eye would make him work harder than that. But if he failed even one task before then, he would be kicked off the show without so much as a “thank you for your time and suffering.” And Ross Delvin hadn’t gone through six months of hell to lose it all because of a bad case of the runs.

  The Eye already knew that Ross took a shit every morning like clockwork, right after breakfast. “Regular as Oregon rain, the Delvin men,” his father used to say as he disappeared with his newspaper into the only bathroom in the house. Ross and his two brothers would stand outside the door jumping from one foot to the other, but their father wouldn’t budge. Sometimes they even resorted to running out back for relief, praying the whole time that Mrs. Dyers from next door or the Kriscol gang from down the street wouldn’t happen by and catch one of them squatting in the marigolds.

  The Eye also knew that last night’s dinner had been bean and cheese burritos dipped in medium hot chili sauce. Ross had been less than an hour into his task when the first shockwave hit his stomach. He let out a tremendous bassoon blast of gas and that had helped, at least for a while. But, by the second hour, the waves of pain were coming closer and closer together. To fart now would unleash a tsunami of sickness that could not be stopped. By the third hour, the cramps and nausea were so bad his vision had begun to blur.

  Ross closed his eyes and tried to think about the money—the big payoff, the reward for six months of having to take whatever kinds of fresh humiliation the Eye could dream up.

  “Meet Ross Delvin!” he roared, grinning and mugging for the Eye. The one in the living room was hidden somewhere among the elaborate equipment of his media console. Sometimes at night, sitting in the dark with the shades drawn, he thought he could hear the faint click and whirr of its machinery. “A schlepp so ordinary that his very ordinariness is extraordinary!”

  It was his best quote yet, destined to go viral. But only if he stayed on his feet. Only if he completed the task.

  And how many more tasks will there be after this one? How long can you keep up the nut swinging, Ross, old boy?

  “Shut up!” Ross screamed, almost losing his balance. That voice didn’t belong to the Eye. It belonged to the mean little sadist that lived inside Ross’s head, constantly bringing him down, constantly making him doubt. Before the Eye, that voice spoke to him every day. It liked to remind him of The Four Wasted Years—four years of Ramen noodle dinners and falling asleep in the library; four years of one crummy part-time job after the other just to cover the cost of books and tuition and not much else. Four years of deluded happiness in the “someday” payoff of a fulfilling job with a great paycheck magically waiting outside the gates of Oz. Only Ross’s yellow brick road had turned out to be a dead-end alleyway reeking of piss and garbage.

  His first set of résumés went to the most prestigious urban development firms in the city. The next round went to government offices and nonprofits. When an offer finally came in for a low-paying job crunching numbers for a third-rate data collection company, he’d taken it.

  His best friend Tyler had tried to warn him. “All the money is in media these days, Ross. The public sector is a dinosaur dying in its own bureaucratic tar pit.”

  As Ross struggled along in the tar, Tyler had zipped forward with Darwinian speed. Less than a year after graduation, he’d helped bankroll a tech start-up that landed him an easy six-figure return. At an age when most guys were still living in their parents’ basement, Tyler owned his own apartment in the best zip code in the city. His official job title was “business development specialist” at a social marketing firm. He peppered his conversation with phrases like “deadflow” and “product market fit,” but Ross never could figure out exactly what he did to earn all that money he talked so much about.

  Tyler’s personal mantra was, “The future belongs to the entrepreneur,” and Ross didn’t doubt it. It had to belong to someone, since it definitely didn’t belong to him.

 
Ross’s future was a dim, distant point on the flat-line horizon of his present. Before the Eye, he’d sleepwalk through his nine hours and then come home to his real life—his online life, where he could be whatever version of himself he wanted to be. One night after a marathon streaming session, he decided that if he couldn’t earn money the old-fashioned way, he’d try the new one. And these days, money came from fame. And fame came from media. Like always, Tyler had been right all along.

  Ross started sending audition tapes to every reality TV show he could find. He made shorts films of himself doing attention-grabbing things—antagonizing his local barista about fair-trade coffee in an outrageously fake foreign accent and then refusing to pay; turning a parking ticket into an origami of a fist raising a giant middle finger. He uploaded the videos to YouTube and created a blog account where he posted long, drunken tirades about political and social issues. He even created a catchy alias—Mad Dog, an Everyman pushed over the edge in a dog-eat-dog world. For weeks, he checked his accounts obsessively, even neglecting his work to add new posts throughout the day. He started following the social media accounts of dozens of reality TV stars. But apart from a handful of hits here and there and a lot of comments that went into either the spam or hate mail files, Mad Dog was turning out to be all bark and no bite.

  He was about ready to let the whole thing go when one day in the middle of inputting data about the local voting habits of non-smoking, college-educated males between the age of twenty-four to thirty-five, he sneaked a peek at his email and there it was—a message from a production company he’d never heard of. It turns out they had a hot new reality show already bankrolled by a major cable network. All they needed now was a star to take the show all the way to the top. The message ended with a question: How far is Mad Dog willing to go?

  For the first time in a long time, Ross felt a jolt of excitement—of possibility. Someone must have seen his blog or YouTube videos; someone out there knew about Mad Dog.

  Ross hit reply, typed “How far is Mad Dog willing to go? All the fucking way!” Then he hit send and went back to his non-smoking male voter patterns.

  But the email stayed with him all day. He’d look up from his surveys and databases and discover that he had no idea what he was supposed to be working on. His head was filled with images of himself—on TV, online, on products on the aisles of superstores all over the country. If he could get the right kind of break, Mad Dog could even go viral globally. As the hours ticked by, he dreamed of six-figure endorsement deals, movie offers—you name it, Mad Dog could get it.

  Reality came crashing back in at quitting time when he realized he hadn’t even finished half of his workload. There’d be hell to pay tomorrow unless he stayed late and played catch-up. Resigned to a night of more mind-numbing number-crunching, Ross checked his email, not really expecting anything special.

  So he just about fell out of his chair when right there at the top of his inbox was a reply from the production company. The subject line said, “Welcome to the Eye.” With shaking hands, Ross opened the attached document. It was a contract, twelve pages of densely packed rules and regulations, including the stipulation that he remove all of his Mad Dog content from the Internet. From now own, everything about Mad Dog belonged to the network. All Ross had to do in return was agree to complete a series of increasingly difficult tasks, all of which would be filmed for use in the show. Ross had to agree to have hidden cameras placed in his apartment; clandestine film crews would follow him around the rest of the time, only he would never know where or when they’d be. He couldn’t speak about the show or tell anyone what was going on. The payoff was a two-million-dollar prize plus all the fame and glory of a hit TV show. All he had to do was complete the tasks.

  That night, Ross stayed at work so late that the janitor came and went before he did. But the surveys and databases had been completely forgotten. He went through the entire contract line by line. Even so, he knew he should have a lawyer take a look at it first. At least let it sit overnight to slow things down and think it all over. But then again, thinking things over hadn’t done much for him so far. Would Mad Dog “think it all over” like some neurotic ostrich with his head permanently stuck in the sand? For that matter, would Tyler?

  A few minutes before midnight, Ross attached the freshly completed contract to his acceptance email and hit send.

  At first, nothing in his life changed. He went to work, came home, and flopped in front of the television with his laptop open just like always. Then one day about a month after he’d sent the contract, he stepped inside his apartment and could tell something was different. He somehow knew the Eye was here, there, everywhere—all around him, watching his every move. Had the Eye been there all day, following his every move at work? Had it followed him home on the bus and into the lobby of his crummy apartment building? In a camera-blink instant, Ross became aware of himself in an entirely new way. He squared his shoulders and stood up straight; he worked up a more determined, more hard-edged facial expression. He arranged himself into what he thought Mad Dog might look like—a man worthy of being watched.

  Soon after, the tasks began. Sometimes they came to him directly, in an email message or Facebook post. Sometimes they came in the form of clues that he had to figure out, like the time he kept getting status updates about telling your boss to shove it and walking off the job. He’d hesitated over that one—what if he didn’t win the game? What was he going to live on until the big payoff? When he’d walked into the office the next morning, his heart had been like a hard little pebble knocking around his chest. But Mad Dog wouldn’t worry about small-time shit like money or some crap office job. Mad Dog would kick down his cubicle walls and never look back. And Ross Delvin was Mad Dog. Or would be soon.

  At first the tasks were easy enough. The Eye might ask him to stay awake for two nights straight, or not take a bath for a week. Things like that. But somewhere along the line the Eye got crueler, more devious. Telling him to quit his job had been a bad one. His paltry excuse for a savings account was almost gone, and if some of that fame and fortune didn’t come through soon, Ross was going to be in a world of hurt. Right now though, the only hurt he was worried about was the one rumbling through his bowels.

  Ross closed his eyes and tried not to count the seconds. When he opened them, he caught sight of someone in the mirrored glass of the curio cabinet. The pale lump of dough staring back at him still didn’t look like a Mad Dog. The Eye had told him over and over again how much appearance matters: “Viewers want lean and mean.” Even though Ross was still more butter bean than lean and mean, he had lost a lot of weight since the show started. Maybe that’s why the Eye made him run up and down the steps to his apartment building for hours on end, or go for weeks only eating yellow and white food. But thinner wasn’t necessarily better depending on how you got that way.

  The lump of dough began to waver and blur. Ross closed his eyes again to make him vanish. The last thing he needed was for the Eye to catch him crying. Screaming, cursing, flailing, foaming at the mouth—all those things were good for the ratings. But as Ross’s father used to tell him, nobody likes a crybaby.

  Later on today, after he’d completed his task, Ross would finally get rid of that curio cabinet. Brooke was the one who’d picked it out in the first place. It was the first real piece of furniture they’d bought after moving in together.

  “I want furniture that I don’t have to put together myself,” Brooke told him. “Starting with this apartment, no more ply-board cabinets that come in enough pieces to fit into a pizza box. Deal?”

  “Deal. Especially since I’m the one who gets stuck putting together the ply-board cabinets.”

  She kissed him and shot him one of those shy smiles he loved so much. “Right. But now you’re going to be the one stuck carrying the put-together kind!”

  He smiled at the memory of how they’d had to rock and coax the thing up the building’s front stairs and down the hall to the elevator like a d
runken uncle at a family Christmas party.

  “I’m going to use it to display our timeline,” Brooke told him once it was finally installed in the living room. “The top shelf will be for our wedding, and the middle will be for our kids—two at least, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe we should just concentrate on a set of pots and pans first.”

  “Then by the time you get to the bottom shelf,” Brooke continued, “we’ll be two old folks holding hands on a park bench in Florida.”

  One photo had made it onto a shelf, at least—their first official “couple” shot after they’d started dating. It had been taken during their last winter break before graduation. Both of them had on silly knit hats and were smiling up at a snow-swirled sky. Ross realized that Tyler must have been the one taking the picture.

  Brooke and the photo were gone now, but the cabinet had stayed. The rest of the shelves had stayed empty.

  A shrill buzz assaulted the silence of the living room. Ross cried out and tried to keep his balance, but he felt his legs and bowels give way at the same time.

  “Noooooooo!” he cried, curling into the fetal position as the putrid brown puddle crept across the carpet. He’d failed! All of that sacrifice and suffering only to end up in a pile of his own shit, just like always!

  Ross sat up and stared at the Eye. It stared back at him with its Cyclopean indifference. Ross started laughing, no longer caring about the ruined rug or the empty cabinet shelves or even that he was still sitting in a pile of his own shit. The only thing he cared about was that the Eye was still there, still watching. He hadn’t fallen until after the buzzer went off—he’d made the three hours after all! He’d completed his task. He could still win the money. He could still be somebody important. It wasn’t too late.