Darkness Released (Darkness Series Book 2) Read online

  Darkness Released

  The Darkness Series, Book Two

  By Candis Vargo

  Darkness Released

  Copyright © 2016 by Candis Vargo.

  All rights reserved.

  First Print Edition: April 2016

  Limitless Publishing, LLC

  Kailua, HI 96734

  www.limitlesspublishing.com

  Formatting: Limitless Publishing

  ISBN-13: 978-1-68058-578-0

  ISBN-10: 1-68058-578-9

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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

  Dedication

  To my siblings: those I grew up with, those I’ve searched for, and those I found along the way. Separated at birth, we beat all the odds and found each other. Believe in the impossible.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

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  Chapter 1

  Hailey’s stomach churned. She didn’t want to return to that house, but something had been calling her back to it for quite some time now. Maybe it was the simple fact that it was about to be torn down. That twisted her heart, as much as she hated the place. She stood as still and solid as stone.

  “It’s just a house,” she whispered as she brushed a strand of her black, curly hair away from her face.

  And that’s exactly what it was. Just an old, abandoned house that sat atop a small hill on an old, dirt road. A large, flat field sat at the back of the house where she and her brother used to play; it stretched on as far as one could see, and there wasn’t a house around for miles.

  Though the sun was shining, the house was ominously dark. It had always been dark, just as it had always just been a house—a place she grew up with her siblings. It was never truly a home.

  Maybe it was dark from the life they endured. She didn’t know. She had no way of knowing.

  She stood at the bottom of the hill, next to the old oak tree. One of its larger branches had fallen off, and it laid across the drive next to her.

  “You ready to say goodbye?”

  Hailey looked over at her brother, who stood beside her. He stood close to a foot taller than she was, and his hair was significantly lighter than hers and cut fashionably. Even though he wasn’t in uniform, he still exuded that cop vibe; it was in the way he carried himself. He was always like that, though…like he was destined to be a police officer.

  “I said goodbye a long time ago,” she mumbled.

  The caw of a crow drew her attention to the large metal antenna that sat on the roof of the house. She always thought of crows as a bad omen. Hailey shuddered and tried to ignore the sound. Stepping forward, she stomped down the weeds. The sound of them crackling underneath her feet seemed to intensify the cry of the crow. It was surreal to think that their once perfectly trimmed yard had turned into an overgrown field.

  Leading the way, Hailey created a path up the hill and headed to the side of the house. Pollen scattered through the air, tickling her nose as she looked at the ground. As a kid, she would always see snakes slithering around, and with the weeds as high as they were she was surprised she hadn’t seen the slightest sign of one of the scaly creatures. The damn crow was the only animal that seemed to be around, making her regret going there even more.

  The tan siding was falling off and all of the doors and windows of the house were boarded up, but the barrier on the basement door was pried open enough for them to squeeze through. Alex pulled it out a little further, and held it open for her before squeezing through himself.

  Hailey let out a small snicker as soon as they were inside.

  “What?” Alex asked.

  “Just thinking about what would happen if a cop was caught breaking and entering.”

  Alex laughed. “Just visiting our old house before it gets torn down. I think we’d be all right.”

  Hailey noticed that he didn’t call it “home” either.

  Alex turned on the flashlight app on his phone and lit the way to the basement stairs. They sloshed through an inch of water to the other side of the basement. Anytime there was rain, the basement would flood at least a few inches.

  Once they reached the top of the stairs, Hailey turned on her cell flashlight app too, knowing they’d inevitably end up in separate places.

  The door at the top of the stairs was broken off its hinges and laid in front of them on the other side of the hall. Hailey shone her light on the door, which was riddled with holes—no doubt from looters. She would never understand the lure of abandoned houses.

  They stood in the hall, and Hailey shone her light to her right, looking down the hallway at the door of her old bedroom.

  “Crazy, isn’t it?” Alex said. Hailey realized he had walked away.

  She joined him in the kitchen, and they used the light from their phones to look around. The kitchen wasn’t large, but it was all they’d ever needed. It was U-shaped, with the sink facing a window on the outer wall, and a bar that separated the kitchen from the dining room. Hailey never understood why her mother never put stools there; it could have been used as a seating area.

  The cabinet doors were all either torn off, or had holes in them, and all the piping was torn out. Scrap metal could get people a pretty penny, and she had no doubt that’s why the refrigerator and stove were gone too.

  Alex walked to the other side of the bar, where their dining table once sat, and tore the plywood off of the large window, letting light into the house.

  Attached to the kitchen was the living room, which were matched in size. Pale walls and brown carpet—it was always so plain. The best memories their old living room held was those of her brother always trying to trap Santa Claus. And oh boy did he set up some elaborate traps.

  “Man, I remember when Mom put this floor in.”

  Hailey looked down at the black-and-white checkered floor.

  “Yeah,” she said. A small smile played across her face. “She had us run across it in our socks to help the tiles stick.”

  “Let’s go check out our old rooms.” Alex’s enthusiasm made Hailey wonder if he remembered anything about the time they had spent in that house.

  They started down the hallway, and Alex stopped at the door next to the basement steps. “Oh my God, remember this?” His smile was sinister as he opened the closet door. “Oooh, spooky.”

  Rolling her eyes, Hailey said, “That was pathetic for a ghost noise, and yeah, I remember.”

  She had some good memories from her childhood, but most of them were horrible. She couldn’t even fathom trying to grasp onto the rest of her memories. People say you block out the horrible things that happen to you, and that’s what she did, because she only had a handful of memories of her childhood left.
But she could faintly remember what Alex was talking about.

  They’d been children, playing hide-and-seek with their dad. Hailey had decided to hide inside the bathroom closet. Since she was so small, she managed to climb onto the top shelf and close the door. She didn’t know where Alex ran off to hide, but she didn’t care. She knew she picked the best spot. That was until she saw the hand of another child on the floor below her. The hand had reached out and thrown a dish cloth at the door.

  It took her a moment to remember that Alex wasn’t in there with her. When she did remember, she ran out of that bathroom like a bat out of hell. She started walking down the hallway when she heard the distinctive sound of pots and pans banging together in the hallway closet. Though it was always full of coats and piled high with spare blankets, her mother wouldn’t be above shoving some pans in there.

  Curious about the noises, Hailey had opened the door and found Alex.

  “Why were you in there making so much noise?” Hailey’s brother had yelled.

  “I wasn’t,” she’d tried to protest.

  “Yes you were. I saw you in there with me and I wasn’t the one playing with pans!”

  It took Hailey a while to get her brother to realize that she’d hid in the bathroom closet, not in the hallway closet with him. Their dad had said that the kid Alex saw in the closet with him wasn’t real, that it was just his imagination. As for the sound of the banging pots and pans, their dad didn’t have any explanation for that.

  They’d had a few more paranormal experiences in that house. Once, cabinet doors slammed open and shut, but mostly it was simple things like phantom knocking on the front door, or the VCR acting possessed—it would fast forward, rewind, or record whenever it pleased. It was never anything major, and as they grew up they just blamed it on being kids with active imaginations.

  Hailey snapped back to the present moment. Four more rooms lined the hallway, and the first they stopped in was Alex’s. It was across from the closet door, and even with the lights shining everything was black.

  His eyes were full of excitement. “Remember when I finally convinced Mom and Dad to let me paint my room black?”

  At one point he’d also convinced them into letting him shoot some glow in the dark goo on the ceiling.

  The room beside his belonged to their parents. They didn’t spend much time in there; the only memories that room held were those of digging through the closet, snooping for Christmas presents.

  The door at the end of the hall was Hailey’s, and she ran her fingers across it, circling the holes which riddled it.

  “Remember all those times I’d lock myself in here to hide from you because you kept trying to kill me?” She laughed.

  “Ha. Mom was pissed when she came home and saw these holes. What did I use, a metal pole or something? You barricaded yourself in pretty good…”

  Their parents had left them home alone a lot, but in those days parents did that all the time. There wasn’t much concern about people stealing your children back then, especially in a small town. Maybe it was because it wasn’t plastered all over the news then, but having only two fuzzy TV channels limited the amount of news they received.

  Alex’s enthusiasm faded when they came to a stop outside of the bathroom.

  “Hey, come on.” He tugged on Hailey’s arm. “Let’s get outta here.”

  But Hailey stood there, frozen. It wasn’t out of fear or sadness. No, it was anger. That bathroom held a memory far more mortifying than seeing a mere hand.

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  When they got back outside where they started, they stopped and faced the house one last time.

  “You know, I’m not sad it’s getting torn down.” Hailey sighed. “I think it’s more of a relief than anything.”

  “Come on.” Alex turned away. “Emily is making dinner, and I wouldn’t put it past her to kill us if it gets cold.”

  Hailey agreed. Emily was Alex’s wife and eight months pregnant, with a tendency for escalating moods. They had two boys: Mason, who was five, and James, who was seven, and they were expecting a baby girl—who they hadn’t picked out a name for yet. Emily swore that this was her worst pregnancy yet because she was so far along, and the summer heat was, in her words, killing her.

  Hailey rode in the front seat of the Dodge as Alex drove the half hour back to his house. And what a house it was; though not quite a mansion, if she compared to the doublewide on a foundation they’d grown up in, and her studio apartment, it was better than anything she’d ever lived in.

  His residence was a two-story home in a little suburban neighborhood, with a lawn beautifully decorated with hedges. Hailey always figured they would end up putting those pink flamingos in the yard, because the neighborhood seemed like that type of place. The front porch was made out of stone, which matched the deep green vinyl siding perfectly.

  “We’re back,” Alex announced as they walked inside, but with the sound of his kids arguing, Hailey was sure Emily didn’t hear them. They were greeted by their reflections in the mirror that hung on the wall directly in front of the door. A small table stood underneath the mirror, which was beautifully decorated with a vase of flowers in the center and a few family pictures on each side. Emily thought that seeing yourself in the mirror and their family pictures as soon as you walked in made people see themselves as part of the family and feel at home.

  The smell of lasagna filled the air. Hailey’s stomach growled.

  “Boys, knock your crap off and go wash your hands,” Emily demanded right before spotting Alex and Hailey. “Just in time.” She smiled, but her exhaustion still showed. “Hailey, glad you could come for dinner.”

  Hailey walked over and embraced Emily. “Anything to get out of eating takeout.”

  “Smells good, babe. Mmm, lasagna,” Alex said as he sat at the end of the table.

  The rectangular wooden table was average sized. Three chairs lined one side, and a bench sat on the other. The boys ran into the room and sat down at the bench. Emily braced the underside of her baby bump, and squatted down slowly in order to sit. Alex made plates of food for the boys, and the rest of them helped themselves.

  “Is this boxed lasagna?” Alex asked after his first bite.

  Emily pointed her fork at him like it was a weapon. “You hungry?” She eyed him. “Then shut up.”

  The boys giggled as Emily changed the subject. She looked at Hailey.

  “So, when is it your turn to get married and have kids?”

  Nearly choking on her food, Hailey made a fist and pounded on her chest. Great. Kids were a subject Hailey wouldn’t mind avoiding.

  “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a mom. I love my little nephews and all,” she said as she rubbed the top of Mason’s head, “but I don’t think it’s for me.”

  “Aw, come on. It’s not that bad. Unless you’re eight months pregnant in summer.” Emily rubbed her stomach.

  Alex snickered. “Got that right.”

  Emily held the fork up again as she gave him her best scowl—the kind that held venom in the eyes and could cause any man to cower, the one that husbands often called the “wife stare”. Alex held his hands up in surrender.

  “Nah, it’s not that. I just don’t know how good of a mom I’d be. Being an aunt is one thing, but being a mom is on a whole different level.”

  Emily thrust her fork into her food. “Oh, it comes natural to you. Once you have the baby, your motherly instincts kick in. There’s a whole lot of learning, but we women are built with the basic instincts—to love and protect—even if it means waking up to feed every two hours.”

  Mason looked up to Emily and said, “Mom, where do babies come from? Like, how do they get out of your belly?”

  Hailey tried not to laugh. She was glad Mason had chimed in, though. It took the spotlight off of her.

  Hailey didn’t hear what Emily said, because she was lost in her own thoughts. If women were built with motherly instincts, then what happened to her mom’
s instincts? Hailey didn’t want to be a mother because she was scared to become like her own. She didn’t know how a parent was supposed to love a child. Hell, she didn’t even know what people taught their kids. Her mom never taught her how to cook, or how to do her hair and makeup. The only thing her mother ever taught her was how to cut herself.

  Growing up, she had heard her mother talk plenty of times about killing herself. How she’d do it, where she’d do it. She’d even watched her mother try one time. Her dad had held her mother down as she screamed, and Hailey, just a child, had sat in the hallway behind a couple of boxes and watched as paramedics came in and dragged her mother out. She had visited her mother in the mental hospital on several occasions, even on some holidays.

  So, Hailey started to cut. Cutting became a form of escape, a way to release her pain. Her wrists and arms were covered in scars that she’d had to conceal with makeup every day. All the times her mother said she would slice her wrists open, Hailey feared for her but never truly believed she could do it.

  But she did.

  Her mother lay in the bathtub full of bloody water. Her wrists were slit open, and just for good measure, her mother had also cut the inside of her elbows and behind her knees. Her eyes weren’t closed the way they portrayed in the movies, no, they were wide open. Her hazel eyes stared into space as her arm laid on the side of the tub, dripping blood into a puddle on the floor.

  And Hailey was the one who’d found her.

  Chapter 2

  The blaring of her alarm clock woke her. Hailey rolled over in bed, hitting the clock until it shut off. There probably wasn’t a more annoying sound in the world. It was six in the morning, and she was a ball of miserable sunshine. She rolled back around, getting comfortable in her bed.

  That’s why they call it a comforter. Because it’s so darn comfy.