Dark Mistery


(Chapter 1)


Everyone has a secret, but some secrets should be kept secret.




By Chris Black


So you really want to hear my story?


Okay, I think I'll start the night I got the power and something happened to me that won't happen even in their darkest nightmares. I think I described it earlier as the worst thing that can happen to a fifteen year old teenager. Well, I think I was an understatement, but see for yourself.


But before I get to that terrible August night, I want to tell you something about my home and my family. I'm from Derry. It's a small town of just under 1,000 people in Maine, Ohio, United States. It is a three-hour drive from Salt Lake City on the freeway and from the outside is a real little idyll.

In the housing estates there are many white houses with a red roof, a cherished and well-tended front yard and a white picket fence in front of them. In the driveways, shiny mustangs and chevys are parked in front of cleanliness, and on top of the gables there is a zinc tap with its beak pointing north.


You know, it's not that I hated my home country, but I just couldn't get rid of the hypocrisy with which everything went there, which is why I would probably have agreed immediately if my father had said at some point that we were moving away to New York or Chicago, but he wasn't supposed to come back to that.


Well, even if I didn't particularly like the city, I had a very pleasant childhood in Derry. I went to Derry High School, played catch or fly kites in Bassey Park, and used my lawn mowing money to buy a can of Pepsi from old Mister Kostenzo. Well, and then I was brought back to reality overnight and turned into a killer.

My family was actually all right. My father George was a lawyer and worked a lot, which is why I only saw him in the morning between ties and briefcases, just before the school bus came. I think that's why I miss him the least. My mother Clara was a die-hard housewife and mother, even though she intended to be a painter. She was really good at it, only, came back then, my parents were just eighteen and nineteen my big brother Mike in between. So my mum gave up her art studies and started specializing in baking, cleaning and having children. Mike was nearly four years older than me and the star of the high school football team. And he always took advantage of me. And then there was my little sister Gretchen, who was just six at the time.


I was quite satisfied with them, even if as a middle child I only experienced the bad sides of being siblings, that is, I was allowed to take care of the little ones and play the lackey for the older ones.The only family member I really liked was my little cat "Mistress". I found her sitting in a tree in Bassey Park on a rainy day and just took her home with me.


Well, because the evening when fate hit me hard in the face was a very special evening. It was "Shanukka". It's kind of like Halloween, just a little over the top.


Actually, this annual festival is only celebrated in Derry and the surrounding area because, according to legend, it has something to do with the crater in which Derry is located. Allegedly a meteorite or a spaceship with aliens landed here long ago and left a secret and on Shanukkah the ghosts of these monsters come out and want to steal the soul of the living, which is why you should dress up as horribly as possible so that they yourself frighten and disappear again.


Or something, I never really got into that story.

In any case, it was Shanukkah and I was planning to go around with a few friends, knock on the doors and get loads of sweets, as you do with Shanukkah, although I have to say that the game is with the "sweets or prank", like in the big cities, but very different from ours here. If you don't open the door for the children in New York or Los Angeles on Halloween or don't give them sweets, eggs are thrown at the door or the tree in the front yard is wrapped with toilet paper, but here in Derry you come with such trivialities not of that. Sometimes the car tires are stabbed flat or the pet is kidnapped on the spot.


I can remember that an accident really happened only once. It was almost six years ago. Old Misses Dougle hadn't opened the door to a group of kids at Schanukka and they cut the brake lines of their old Ford with a pocket knife.Well, the old lady drove off the next morning to buy some bread and what can I tell them, she sped me into the bakery about seventy kilometers an hour. Took all the shop window decorations and knocked over the newly baked wedding cake from the McKanseys, the newlywed couple who had just returned from their Caribbean vacation. Two customers and a saleswoman were slightly injured and she hit her steering wheel so hard that her neck broke.


The children were never said to or even added to. You have never seen the inside of a police station either, and that doesn't surprise me at all. In Derry, things like that are still quite harmless when I think of the stroke case. He was always called the pentagram murder.


The Stroker family was a perfectly normal small town family. The man's name was Jake, his wife Clarissa, the two twins were called Kevin and Janine, I think. Well, one day the whole family disappeared without a trace.Even the German shepherd "Twinkers" was gone.


A few days later, Rick Huggenson and Peter Faulkner wanted to go to the Knutschecke in Bassey Park. This is a system that is arranged in a pentagon. In every corner there is a large, sturdy oak tree and in front of it is a bench. Each of these benches is separated from the other by a hedge wall so that you can kiss undisturbed there, which was particularly popular with the teenagers.


Well, the two boys, incidentally the only publicly known gays in Derry, normally one is still very narrow-minded here when it comes to the subject, the Strokers have found. Each one hung on one of the five oaks. Even the dog was hanging there on a rope and dangling in the wind, its pink tongue hanging dead out of its cold mouth. It is generally said to have been mass suicide, although a few people claim that someone killed them all.


Or then there was the toilet case. Little Jessica Spring, just seven years old, was sitting in the toilet when she was dragged through the drainpipe into the sewer by a monster unknown to most people, probably also to them.The bathroom must have looked terrible, I mean, a 1.46 m tall and 40 kg heavy child was pushed into a 10 cm wide pipe.


Well, if you want to know what little Jessica got down there, it was an Octalus. These are oversized octopus-like monsters that live in sewers or underground shafts. Basically they look exactly like an octopus, only that they have a mouth with teeth, are almost a hundred times larger and slimier and at the end of each of their tentacles, which can be up to a hundred meters long, have an eyeless, hinged second mouth. They also feed on them. The tentacles slide through the tubes, then find a victim, like little Jessica, swallow them and then transport them through the tentacles to the main stomach, whereby the prey is digested during the transport.


But I wanted to tell you about Schanukka, excuse me for digressing again.


Well, I was planning on moving around the houses with some friends.Gretchen and Mike were supposed to go with them too, but Mike had rotted badly at his last game and broke his leg and Gretchen caught a cold, so I went alone.


So I put on my costume. It was a manga or anime character called Goku, I don't know if you know him, took a couple of bags and went out the door.


When I was standing in front of the doorstep, I suddenly felt a strange feeling. I suddenly knew that I would never see my parents, my brother and my sister again alive. I just knew. Just like I knew my friend Cody would be dressed up as Spiderman if I went out right away.


So I memorized it exactly. My father was sitting on the couch and drinking beer. One of those cheap eco-horror films was shown on television in which the world is always threatened by radioactive giant ants and crocodiles that have grown enormously from toxic waste.

My mother was standing in the kitchen preparing a couple of sandwiches while singing against Madonna, who was playing on the radio.


Mike and Gretchen were both in their beds. Gretchen was already asleep, Mike was probably watching the MTV Video Music Awards, which were broadcast today. And Mistress was up under my bed dozing off.


They are probably thinking now that I should have done something, whom I somehow knew, that they would soon no longer be alive, but I had no urge to tell them. It wasn't that I ran to drag her out of the house and brought her to the hospital for surveillance, or that I stayed home because of that, no, I just shrugged my shoulders, said goodbye, even in not in a special way, just "See you later" and then went out into the dark at night. By the way, it's always darker at night in Derry than anywhere else.

In fact, Cody was wearing a spiderman costume. Fred and Lisa stood next to him. Freddy was on the road as Godzilla and Lisa had dressed up as Xena and so we went out and had a nice evening.


Shortly before half past twelve, we had the last house behind us and our bags were full to the brim. I think I had never stolen as much as I did then. Never.


We exchanged one or the other product, ate something and then made our way home again.


I parted with them first and happily walked down Shadow Road where I lived. As soon as I came into sight of my house, I knew something was wrong.


The lights were on in the whole house, even upstairs at Gretchen's, and the front door was open to the spear and where the doorknob was once there