Dark Corner
Published January 2004
Available In Stores Now
PRAISE:
"Massey creates effective suspense, some harrowing scenes, and characters
you actually care about."
— Fangoria
"Brandon Massey takes his readers to a new height of terror...
Highly recommended reading!"
— Huntress Reviews
SYNOPSIS: From Brandon Massey, award-winning author of THUNDERLAND, comes a terrifying new novel about a town besieged by evil...and the one man who is determined to fight the darkness...
When renowned author Richard Hunter dies in a boating accident, his son David travels to Mason's Corner, Mississippi, to find out more about the father he never really knew. At first, Mason's Corner seems friendly and unassuming-the perfect "small town." But after a newcomer moves into the old-and supposedly haunted-mansion on the hill, everything changes...
People begin to disappear. Dogs viciously attack. And soon David discovers that the terror consuming this place has its roots in his own family tree...
For something has risen in Mason's Corner. Something with bloody ties to the town's past. Something undead--and hungering for vengeance...
At sunrise on Friday, August 23rd, David Hunter drove away from his townhouse in Atlanta with a U-Haul trailer hitched to his Nissan Pathfinder. The trailer contained clothes, two computers, books, small pieces of furniture, and other assorted items that held sentimental or practical value. He had left behind everything else at the townhouse, which, in his absence, would be occupied by his younger sister and her roommate.
In the SUV, David had a roadmap, a thermos full of strong black coffee, a vinyl CD-case full of hip hop, R&B, gospel, and jazz discs, and his four-year-old German Shepherd, King. King lay on the passenger seat, looking out the window as they rolled across the highway. David tended to drive with one hand resting on the canine's flank.
They made excellent time. Traveling Interstate 20 West, they swept through Georgia and entered Alabama within a couple of hours. It was a fine day for a road trip. The morning sunlight was golden, and the cloudless sky was a tranquil ocean-blue. Traffic was light and flowed smoothly.
After three hours on the road, sixteen miles outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama, David pulled into a rest area. He kept King on a leash as they walked along the grassy sward of the designated Pet Walk, but the dog was well-behaved and didn't wrestle against the leash or try to force David into a run. King handled his business near a tree with the solemn dignity that befitted his name.
David was returning to the truck, planning to let the dog inside so he could go back and use the rest room himself, when he saw the man.
He leaned against a white Cadillac DeVille. Slender and brown-skinned, perhaps in his mid-fifties, he wore a green shirt and tan slacks. He talked on a cell phone, checked his watch.
From a distance of about thirty feet, the man looked like David's father.
David stiffened and stopped. King, brought to a halt, looked at David questioningly.
Although the day was warm and humid, a chill fell over David.
As if sensing David's attention, the man turned. He met David's eyes briefly, then looked away, continuing to chat on the phone.
The man was not Richard Hunter, his father. Of course, it wasn't him. His father had died five months ago.
David sighed, went to the SUV, and let King climb inside.
I need to stop this, David thought, as he walked to the rest area washrooms. I'll never see my father again. I have to accept it.
He used the restroom, then returned to the parking lot. The man who resembled his father was gone. Whoever he had been.
David got behind the wheel of the SUV.
His cell phone chirped.
"Hey, it's your mama. Where are you?"
It was just like his mother to call the moment after he experienced an episode of weirdness.
"Hey, Mom. I'm right outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I passed the big Mercedes-Benz plant a little while ago."
"You're driving too fast. You shouldn't be that far already."
Although David was twenty-nine years old and had traveled extensively throughout the country, by air and by car, Mom never hesitated to dole out travel tips and cautions.
"I've been cruising at seventy-five. Traffic has been light." He paused, then added: "I'm at a rest area. I just saw a man who looked like Dad."
"Oh," Mom said. A note of melancholy crept into her voice. "Remember how the same thing happened to both of us, when your granddad passed? For a while, it seemed that once a month, we'd see a man who looked exactly like him."
"I remember. But I feel different about this. Because there's always a chance . . ."
"David, honey, it's not good for you to think about that. I know it's painful for you, but you need to try to let it go. Your father is gone."
David swallowed. A monarch butterfly landed on the windshield, its colorful wings gilded with sunlight. It seemed to peer inside the truck at David.
His mother was right. He had told himself the same thing, many times. His father, Richard Hunter, was dead, and gone forever. Any stranger who looked like him was just that--a stranger.
But the circumstances of his father's death stirred a naïve hope that he might be alive.
Richard Hunter had not been an ordinary man. He was a writer, not merely good but brilliant; a Pulitzer Prize winner who evoked favorable comparison to the revered literary lions in the canon of African-American literature: Ellison, Hurston, Wright, Morrison. Richard Hunter had lived an adventurous, colorful life that matched his literary accomplishments. After a brief, disastrous marriage to David's mother that produced only one child, Hunter moved to Paris to write his first novel, an immediate bestseller, and thereafter embarked on a series of journeys that took him from Morocco to China, from South Africa to Nepal, from Australia to Indonesia, from Brazil to Denmark . . . his father's travels could've filled a dozen issues of National Geographic. Writing and publishing one bestselling novel after another, publishing essays in The New Yorker, crafting stageplays that opened on Broadway, and penning the script of an Oscar award-winning film, Richard Hunter had the proverbial Midas touch in the literary world. But his ability to sustain meaningful, long-term relationships seemed to be directly inverse to his writing talent.
David hardly knew his father. Throughout his dad's endless globetrotting, it was a rare event to receive so much as a postcard from him, to say nothing of a birthday or Christmas gift. He called or wrote David every few years, and visited less often. Although Hunter married three more times, and entertained countless girlfriends and mistresses, he never had another child. Often, David had thought that being Hunter's only child would have meant something to his father, but their relationship never developed beyond a superficial, awkward friendliness. David had learned more about Richard Hunter by reading about him in magazines than he had through direct contact with his dad.
But in March of that year, his father had been on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, deep sea fishing, when a storm swept him off the deck and into the ocean. An extensive search by the Coast Guard failed to recover his body. At the coroner's inquest, he was declared legally dead.
Richard Hunter's will revealed that he had bequeathed his money, property, and belongings to David-- the total value of which equaled over four million dollars.
David was suddenly rich, granted a fortune by a man who was a relative stranger to him.
Nagging questions circled David's thoughts. Why did his father ignore him for his entire life, and then will him everything he had owned? Had his father loved him, but been unable to express his feelings? What kind of man had Richard Hunter been, outside his literary exploits?
And the question that haunted David most of all: Was his father really dead? His body had never been recovered, which gave David a fragile hope that, somehow, his father had survived the accident. But if Richard Hunter had survived, then where was he? Why hadn't he resurfaced to reclaim his life?
It was hard to speculate about stuff like that. One bewildering question led to a slew of others even more puzzling.
"I hope you learn a lot about your dad while you're in Mississippi," Mom said. "Like I've told you before, I don't think you need to make this trip, but I know you won't be happy otherwise."
Although his father had been a world traveler, between his journeys, he always returned to his hometown: Mason's Corner, Mississippi. There, he lived in a modest house that had been in the Hunter family for generations. The home had been vacant since his father's death.
"Well, like I've said, I'll be there for a year," David said. "Maybe not that long. It depends on how things go, what I find out."
"What do you expect to find out, David?" Mom said. Mom had asked him the same question before, but there was a desperation in her voice that he hadn't heard previously. "It's a tiny town with three traffic lights. What do you think you're going to learn there?"
David turned the key in the ignition. The engine hummed into life.
"I don't know, Mom," David said. "Maybe . . . the truth."
