OTHER FICTION BY JOHN SHIRLEY

  NOVELS:

  Transmaniacon

  Dracula in Love

  City Come A-Walkin’

  Three-Ring Psychus

  The Brigade

  Cellars

  A Song Called Youth Series Book One: Eclipse

  In Darkness Waiting

  Kamus of Kadizar: The Black Hole of Carcosa

  A Song Called Youth Series Book Two: Eclipse Penumbra

  A Splendid Chaos

  A Song Called Youth Series Book Three: Eclipse Corona

  Wetbones

  Silicon Embrace

  Demons

  The View From Hell

  Her Hunger

  …And the Angel with Television Eyes

  Spider Moon

  Demons

  Crawlers

  COLLECTIONS:

  Heatseeker

  New Noir

  The Exploded Heart

  Black Butterflies

  Really Really Really Really Weird Stories

  Darkness Divided

  In

  Darkness

  Waiting

  John Shirley

  Night Shade Books

  an imprint of Start Publishing, LLC

  New York, New York

  Copyright ©1988, 2005 by John Shirley

  This edition of In Darkness Waiting published 2013 by Night Shade Books.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Night Shade Books, 609 Greenwich Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014.

  ISBN 978-1-62793-313-1

  Published by Night Shade Books,

  an imprint of Start Publishing LLC

  New York, New York

  First published as a mass market paperback

  April, 1988 by NAL Penguin, Inc.

  Praise for In Darkness Waiting

  Publisher's Weekly:

  The insectoid monsters in this visceral horror novel may seem like the stuff of ’50s drive-in B-movies, but Shirley gives them a modern spin that speaks to contemporary concerns. Gray Pilots, as they are called, are physical expressions of suppressed empathy that human carriers bury away until perceived threats to survival force their bloody emergence. A parasitic part of humanity since primitive times, they have been responsible for the worst human atrocities in history. When a psychology experiment goes out of control in remote Jasper, Ore., the town swarms with Gray Pilots, whose stings bring out the cold-blooded killer in everyone and initiate an orgy of sociopathic slaughter. Shirley works a crafty variation on the small-town horror novel, making it an effective vehicle for his dark sociological speculations, and shows that his story’s worst horror is its continuing relevance.

  Visual Industries

  John Shirley has a singular knack that by-the-numbers horror writers can only imagine: He can take something almost absurdly quaint and make it seem terrifying in entirely unexpected ways. This skill is on ample display in In Darkness Waiting, now revised and updated in a new edition. In Darkness Waiting… reads with the cinematic urgency of other Shirley novels. The characters are well drawn and eminently believable as human beings; the brooding rural setting is a refreshing diversion from the New England small towns that infect so much of the genre. But the heart of the novel is what makes this one tick—in Burroughsian fashion, Shirley conjures some of the most insidious monsters since Ridley Scott’s Alien: verminous, winged Gray Pilots… Shirley wisely suggests that the twitching, buzzing, squirming things seen bursting from people's skulls are us, an unrecognized aspect of the human condition, the embodiment of humankind's capacity to suppress empathy. And therein lies the novel’s success.

  Trashotron.com:

  In Darkness Waiting is an intelligent, intellectual piece of literary science fiction horror… What Shirley creates with In Darkness Waiting is exquisitely imagined and grippingly plotted. All you need to do is surrender. Do whatever you have to get your hands on this volume. It's deeply disturbing and engagingly page turning.

  For Mike Shirley who perhaps remembers the Odd-shaped Rocks.

  Foreword

  IN DARKNESS WAITING: THE “DIRECTOR’S CUT”

  This edition of In Darkness Waiting has been re-edited. I updated it a little, cut some youthful excess, tinkered with a few sentences and trimmed some slow bits. But it’s essentially the same book, and it definitely has the same theme. It’s a hard-charging horror story—I suspect it would be difficult to find a horror novel with a scene more extreme than the climax of this book—but its subtext is what is most important to me.

  Paradoxically, some books seem more relevant as time goes on. Or perhaps their relevance is simply brought into prominence by resonant times. In Darkness Waiting seems to me to be one of those books. Before there was any thought of reprinting IDW, I found myself referring to it, more than once, while writing some recent online opinion pieces. I was writing about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and the corollary: the abuse of women and “unbelievers” by Fundamentalist Muslims. How can people stone a woman to death because someone raped her? They do. How can American soldiers gleefully torment and beat and humiliate their prisoners, most of whom had nothing to do with terrorism? They did. When an atrocity comes about, it starts inside the perpetrators. Something happens, in them—a process whereby they dehumanize their victims. Well before the act, the atrocity has begun psychologically—and neurologically.

  People are not innately monstrous. Most people can be quite compassionate, sympathetic, in the right circumstances. Yet somehow they can also switch that compassion off—some unknown trigger comes along, and it’s switched off, within them, like switching off a light. As I mention in IDW, Nazis guarding concentration camps tossed bread to hungry, snowbound birds, feeling genuinely sorry for them, while a few feet away children starved to death, watching enviously as the birds ate crumbs. How can they calmly accept taking part in starving those children, and then feed the birds? Many of these monsters had wives and children they loved. What is the mechanism of the repression of normal human empathy?

  There are many examples of dehumanization from American history. In the book The Plutonium Files by Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen Welsome, we learn that in the 1940s thousands of powerless Americans—blacks, institutionalized children, the poor, prisoners, soldiers—were deliberately exposed to plutonium, often in injections, as part of experiments essentially designed to find ways to protect the experimenters from deadly radiation. The researchers worked for the government, on military grants (all done in secret), to try to find ways to protect the developers of nuclear weapons from radiation. So they injected radioactive particles into people; they gave hundreds of children radioactive iron particles, spoon fed to them in oatmeal, and then, quite dispassionately, they monitored the health of human experimental subjects—eventually, their deterioration—in this effort to protect their own kind. They dehumanized their subjects for the sake of their own survival; to find ways to protect them, the researchers, and people like them, from radiation, at the expense of powerless Americans—who were never told what was happening to them. President Clinton appointed a committee to look into these allegations, and the committee reported its shocking conclusions on the very day that the O.J. Simpson trial concluded—perhaps so that the story would be buried in the press as, in fact, it was.

  In my online piece I wrote: I again call for scientific research into the psychological and neurological mechanism of dehumanization. We need to realize that it’s integral to human behavior—and only through understanding it can we find ways to overcome it.

  It is perhaps significant that the original title of this novel was Insect Inside. If we are not careful to make conscious choices, we become insects, inside.

  In Darkness Waiting is an entertainment. If you like horror, I think there’s a good chance you’ll find it damned entertaining. (Or should that be “entertainment for the damned”?) But it’s also about something that honestly troubles me. It’s also about real life. Yes: all-too-real life. I gave the phenomenon a name in my fictional character’s book: ESS: Empathy Suppression Syndrome. That clinical label was a strategy to promote the notion that we need to engage in a whole new level of what Gurdjieff and the Buddhists call “self-observation.” We need to observe ourselves as a species, with new objectivity, or we’ll never understand the nature of evil.

  And if we don’t understand it, we have no hope of standing against it.

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  DECEMBER 31, 2004

  1

  It was a broken-down, sunbaked little town, but Perry was glad to see it. They’d changed buses twice, with layovers in dreary, steamy bus stations catered by Post House. Aunt June called the food tasteless. Perry wished it were.

  They’d flown from San Diego to Portland, then ridden the bus from the moist green of western Oregon to the arid volcanic waste of central Oregon, twelve hours telescoped out into one seamless continuum of jouncing metal, grimy vinyl seats, bellyaching children, yowling babies, all of it steeped in the reek of the chemical toilet.

  Grey Line for sure, Perry thought.

  Aunt June bore it stoically, but about the ninth hour she muttered, “If Jasper were civilized, we could have taken a train in.”

  If you weren’t so cheap, old girl, Perry thought, we could have rented a car.

  Now, they stood at the bus stop in the headaching
heat in the desert plateau’s late afternoon, looking at the irregular row of shop fronts: Fishing Tackle and Bait; Western souvenir shops, most of them gone out of business and gutted, padlocked; a couple of kids playing sun-faded video-arcade games just inside the open door of Kerney’s Roadside Market. And a service station across the street, with brand-new digital pumps; the old ones, cylindrical with rust-streaked numbers in their gauge windows, uprooted and leaning against the chain-link fence out back. But beside the station was a red cooler… .

  Perry gazed longingly at the old red Coca-Cola cooler. The oval, chrome-segmented station—with its peeling, time-drabbed 1950s notion of futurism—was antique; so was the Coke cooler. The cooler would be filled with ice water and dewy bottles of toy-colored strawberry Nehi and Coca-Cola. You just reached and fished out a bottle and paid the man when you got around to it… .

  Perry put down the baggage, crossed the street, and ran to the cooler. He opened it, and his heart sank.

  It was dusty, bone-dry, cobwebby, like Jasper; empty, except for a couple of old bottle caps. They didn’t trust you anymore, anywhere. He went to the station’s office, bought two cans of lime-flavored soda from the vending machine and returned to Aunt June, who was waiting with amused impatience on the sidewalk.

  “You know I don’t take anything with sugar in it,” she said, turning a shoulder to the soft drink as if recoiling from it. “White death.”

  “You kidding? Hot as it is?”

  “Maybe this once.” She snatched the drink from his hand and quickly drank it off. Perry drank his, and then they set out again, Perry carrying most of the luggage, sweating in the hot July afternoon.

  Okay, Perry thought, so the cooler’s junk. Garvey’s Saloon, at least, across the street, looked like an old fashioned saloon—down to the batwing doors and the hitching post out front. Western-boomtown-style false fronts and rustic lettering decorated every building on Main Street, and a tattered ANNUAL JASPER RODEO & ROUNDUP JULY 4-7 banner sagged over the street.

  “Oh, too bad,” Perry said, “the rodeo was last weekend.”

  “Uh-huh …” Aunt June was squinting at a sheet of notebook paper. She took her blue-tint prescription sunglasses from her purse, put them on, and read, “Five Second Street.”

  “This is Fourth,” Perry said. “Come on.”

  “I thought she’d meet us,” she said. “Maybe more problems with Tetty.”

  Perry glanced at Aunt June, wondering when she was going to finally give him the whole story on Tetty. All he knew was what he’d overheard when Aunt June had spoken to Sandra on the phone, back in San Diego. “What did you say, dear, it’s a crackly connection—she’s what? Worse? Yes, I’ll come. I don’t mind. I’m still on sabbatical, I was getting bored, thinking of coming to Oregon anyway.”And she’d gone on with more polite, kindly untruths: “Oh no, it’s not an inconvenience. No, you keep your money, dear, I’m happy to come if you think I can help. And I haven’t seen you in so long, it’s really unforgivable….Anyway, I was thinking about writing a paper on Tetty’s condition for the APA convention—What? No, of course I wouldn’t mention her by name—Did I tell you I had an assistant? My nephew, Perry. He’s my assistant for the summer. The college pays his salary. Well, no, he’s not a psych student, he’s a music theory student, but he needs the—oh, you’re quite right, I’m running up your bill. July ninth, all right? Okay if I bring Perry?”

  They turned right onto the blessedly shadier Second Street. Pines lined the street on both sides. Perry and Aunt June crunched along the gravel road to Sandra Cummings’s house, number 5, just at the corner of Pine—oh, naturally, Pine—and Second. The house was a mottled gray-white; once it had been painted white, with thick, cheap enamel, and the hot sun of the plateau had cracked the paint, the dry winds had clawed at it, and now it was peeling away, flaking so badly the house looked like a fat gray hen, molting. There was a beak-like gable over the little front porch and the windows of the room at the front of the second floor—Tetty’s room—were the hen’s mindless eyes.

  Gratefully, Perry toted the baggage to the shade of the front porch. Aunt June rang the bell. They waited a surprisingly long time; Perry could hear people moving about in the house. What were they doing? Aunt June rang the bell a second time; it was the loud, abrasive sort of bell that sounded like a miniature burglar alarm. Sandra couldn’t help but hear it. Was she straightening the house at the last moment? But she’d known Aunt June and Perry were coming.

  Perry shrugged and glanced at his aunt. She insisted he call her simply June, but he could think of her only as his aunt. She was forty-eight to his twenty, tall and longnecked, hollow-cheeked, a little stooped; her brown hair, clipped short and parted on the side, was slivered with silver. She wore her awfulest green double-knit polyester pants suit, and in that moment Perry regarded her with undiluted affection.

  The door opened, and Sandra stood there, blurred by the screen between them, her large, downturned eyes moist, her lipstick a sloppy scrawl around her thin lips.

  “Hullo, June. And this must be Perry. Well, glad you’re here.” A tired voice. She fumbled with the hook latch on the screen door in a way that told Perry she was drunk. She swore at the latch, smiling at them between each breathless profanity, then at last popped the latch free and pushed the creaking door open.

  Perry lifted the baggage—and dropped it, flailing at his face. Something dark—many somethings—were flying at his eyes, shrieking out an ear-splitting buzzzzzzzzz. A sound you could feel in your throat. He felt a dirty caress across his Adam’s apple at the same moment—he wasn’t quite sure what made it dirty—and then the buzzing, black things were gone. And it was very quiet.

  Sandra and June were staring at him.

  “What—” he began, looking around. “What, uh—was that?”

  “Was what?” Aunt June asked.

  “Didn’t you see something fly out of the house when she opened the door? At my eyes?” Perry asked. Telling himself, Pick up the bags, don’t be a dork…. He picked them up.

  “No,” Aunt June said. “Flies?”

  “Flies,” said Sandra, nodding to herself. “Flies. We have a little problem with them here. A few too many, sometimes. It’s this part of the country….”

  Flies, Perry thought. What a jerk. Freak out from some flies.

  Moving like an automaton, he carried the bags into the living room and set them in the middle of the dusty gray rug.

  “Well, take a load off,” Sandra said. “I’ll ferret out some lemonade—or perhaps you’d prefer a beer, Perry?”

  “Lemonade’s fine,” said Perry. He’d rather have beer.

  He watched Sandra go into the kitchen. She was British, though she’d lived for so many years in the U.S. she had very little accent. She was one of those compact little English women—the arms seemed a touch short, the head a pinch too big for the body. She was pale, and her pageboy cut was white with a blonde rinse. She wore a tentlike blue housedress printed with lavender hibiscus blossoms. At forty-six she was young for white hair. And for all the lines on her face. And her shaking hands.

  “Oh June,” she called from the kitchen, “what will you have, dear?”

  “What did you used to make me in college?”

  “A panache? Lemonade and beer! Sure!”

  Perry looked at Aunt June in mild surprise. She smiled and said, “The alcohol is so diluted it’s hardly even there.

  “Yeah, but lemonade and beer? I mean, yuck… I’ll have one too.”

  Sandra returned with the drinks on a wooden tray. A dead bluebottle fly lay in one corner of the tray. She didn’t seem to notice it. She put the drinks on a tumbler-marked wooden coffee table that stood beside the great brown lump of the couch like a calf beside a cow. Sitting across from them in a wicker rocking chair, Sandra drank what was probably a martini in a highball glass. Perry and June sat on the musty brown imitation-velvet couch; it creaked whenever they moved. There were no paintings, no decorations at all on the dull yellow plaster walls, except for a shelf of knick-knacks under the plastic-covered front window. Flies droned near the ceiling, ice cubes clinked in the glasses. Perry found himself listening for Tetty. Was she upstairs? Or at some local hospital? Somehow he felt sure she was upstairs. And listening.