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    Dark Corners
    Dark Corners
    Dark Corners
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    Dark Corners

    By William Andrews

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    About this ebook

    'Dark Corners' is an apt description of William Andrews' work. The eight short stories by William that are included in this anthology incorporate various genres and styles, but all contain an element of "the darkness of humanity" as a unifying theme. As a free gift to the reader, 'Dark Corners' takes elements of horror, murder, intrigue, black humour, science fiction, fantasy and even espionage to weave together an entertaining tapestry designed to leave the reader with an insatiable craving to discover more of the author's published work - as well as eagerly awaiting what is soon to come. Above all else, the author hopes that the reader will enjoy his work and want to come back for more.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilliam Andrews
    Release dateApr 29, 2012
    ISBN9781476197937
    Dark Corners
    Author

    William Andrews

    For more than thirty years, William Andrews was a copywriter and a marketing/brand executive with several Fortune 500 companies. For fifteen years, he ran his own advertising agency. At night and on weekends (and sometimes during the workday!), Bill wrote fiction. His first novel, The Essential Truth, won first place in the 2008 Mayhaven Contest for fiction. The Dragon Queen is Bill’s fourth novel and is the second book in his trilogy about Korea, which includes Daughters of the Dragon—A Comfort Woman’s Story and a planned third book. Today, Bill is retired and focused on his writing. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, who’s been an inner-city schoolteacher for thirty-two years.

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      Book preview

      Dark Corners - William Andrews

      DARK CORNERS

      Eight Eerie Tales

      From the Dark Side of the Mind

      By

      William Andrews

      ***~~~***

      Dark Corners

      By William Andrews

      Copyright 2012 William Andrews

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

      ISBN: 9781476197937

      Exit Stage Left based on an original idea by Devlin Black

      Also by William Andrews

      FRIEND REQUEST

      100 MOVIES TO SEE BEFORE I KILL YOU

      (with Devlin Black)

      __________

      There are no untrue stories, only different truths.

      A.K. Pritchard

      If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

      Joseph Goebbels

      Hell is other people.

      Jean Paul Satre

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      1. THE HUMAN CONDITION

      2. THE ROAD TO VEGAS

      3. PRESSED FOR TIME

      4. THERE’S GOOD AND BAD IN EVERYONE

      5. BEFORE THE AFTERMATH

      6. THE GENEVA PHONE CALL

      7. EXIT STAGE LEFT

      8. A CONFEDERATE WEREWOLF IN BOSTON

      REVIEWS

      INTRODUCTION

      Welcome to my collection of short stories, unashamedly given to you as a free eBook download in the hope that you will fall in love with my writing and buy everything else I’ve written. With that purpose in mind, I make no apologies for the fact that the link to my website is at the beginning of this book (below) and the links to where my other works can be found are at the end. Advertising aside, the main reason for making this volume available for free is to give as many people as possible the chance to read my words. I hope you enjoy them.

      The art of short story writing is unforgiving but ultimately richly rewarding. Unlike a novel, where one has 50-150,000 words with which to entertain, baffle and impress the reader, a short story must achieve its goals in a fraction of the word length. The plot and characterisations are heightened and accelerated like Bradley Cooper’s character once he ingests the clear pill in Limitless. There is no room for self-indulgent cleverness and absolutely no excuse for verbosity. It might be the literary equivalent of fast food, but the aim is to make it a richer dining experience than burger and fries. That said, everyone feels like a burger and fries occasionally.

      Words should be treated like diamonds, not sprinkled around like confetti, so I’ll sign off and make way for the storytelling. One of the short stories included here is a prelude to a sci fi zombie novel I have written and which is soon to be published. Another is a re-telling of a story I wrote when I was fifteen. I’ll let you guess which one of the half-dozen-plus-two tales it is, but I’ll give you a clue – it was published in the high school newspaper and erroneously dubbed my ‘anti-God story’ by my friends. That wasn’t really the point I was trying to make when I wrote it, but then the meaning of any story should be inferred by the reader, not spoon-fed by the author.

      I know my loyal fans have more intelligence and worldliness than that. I hope that after reading this eBook, you’ll be a fan too.

      William Andrews

      April 2012

      http://www.darkcorners.com.au

      1. THE HUMAN CONDITION

      The sun was gradually approaching its zenith.

      Krog had already made up his mind to remain exactly where he was for the rest of the day, perched on the highest crag of the rocky outcrop. He would watch the magnificent glowing orb get lower and lower in the sky as the hours passed. It would eventually sink into the ocean at that unreachable far off point beyond the horizon, where the world ended.

      Why shouldn’t he watch the sun god gambol around the sky, he thought, even if that gambolling followed the same predetermined path it did every day? He had very little else to do, and could think of no better way to occupy his dwindling time.

      The difference between him – and his people – and the sun was that the sun would rise again. It always did. By stark contrast, Krog and his people had reached the very end. There would be no redemption, could be no return to the way things had once been.

      Oh, hadn’t life once been so glorious? He was quite an old man and had lived through the cycle of many, many moons. He could remember a time of peace and prosperity, when it had been a blessing to be alive and to be able to walk the earth.

      He could even recall a time when The Others had co-existed with them, had pretended to be their friends.

      That time had not lasted for very long.

      Of course, the world had always presented them with hardships. His people were tough, resilient, and had faced too many challenges to count on the fingers and toes of every one of them combined. This was especially true now that so few of them remained, with not many fingers and toes between them upon which to count.

      But there had been one obstacle, one enemy, which it had been impossible to defeat. The Others had been deceitful. Most of Krog’s people had not even realised they were the enemy until that enemy had betrayed them, overwhelmed them and banded together to push them over the cliffs and into the sea.

      Most of the women who had bred with The Others and the children those unions had spawned were no longer welcomed by the duplicitous enemy in their camp. They were impure, tainted. Those outcasts who had survived the culling had fled to rejoin their people on the barren rock, but these were few in number.

      Some of the women impregnated by The Others had been taken forcibly, hunted by organised packs like animals. Some of these women had remained with the enemy to be used as breeding stock or to perform domestic chores. The blood of Krog’s people was destined to live on, but it would flow diluted through the veins of those whose ancestors had been responsible for his people’s destruction.

      It occurred to Krog ruefully that those who had perished had been the lucky ones, not the survivors. For a proud hunter such as him to entertain such a negative thought was like being forced to eat a mouthful of poison-bark, and even now he shook his head vigorously to dismiss such pessimism as though it was a leech eating into his brain.

      There was no reason to keep fighting, nothing left for which to fight – yet Krog and his people were too hardy and steadfast to just drown themselves in the turbulent azure water that crashed repeatedly against the rocks below in a foamy cascade.

      So Krog would sit and watch the sun go down. That was the sum total of his simple plan. A few of the men joined him, but kept their distance out of respect. Each of them sat alone with the darkness of their own thoughts, even as the midday sun glared upon them with the utmost of its blinding power and scorched their naked skin wherever it was not covered by animal furs. The furs each of them wore were threadbare, so the sun would burn much skin today before it disappeared.

      Behind him he knew a handful of the womenfolk were gathering slimy moss and lichen off the rock, to boil into a thin broth. Every few days one of the men would catch a small monkey or trap a crab in one of the shallow saltwater pools, but it seemed to Krog that the energy required to ensnare those rarely-caught creatures was far greater than the sustenance gained from eating them. A fair share of monkey flesh or crab meat for each of them still amounted to no more than a mouthful, even though the tribe shrank almost daily.

      He had tried so hard to sustain a level of optimism and hope for the sake of his people, but the ennui had set in like a disease he knew he could not shake, like the extreme malaise that gripped elderly members of the tribe when the despair of the bitter winter cold and the terrible hardship of starvation was too much to endure. Krog would surrender soon and so would everyone who followed him. How could they escape the inevitable? They had been pushed onto a barren, craggy rock and there was no longer anywhere he could lead them.

      There was no point getting angry about what had happened. Not any more. The hunters had tried to fight, of course, but they were used to banding together to overpower a mammoth, not outsmarting The Others. They had been just too devious, too duplicitous and deceitful. A mammoth was incapable of deception – it wished merely to survive. Krog and his people shared the same wish – but it was about to be denied by the gods.

      The gods! What had been the point of worshipping them? For countless generations, his people had worshipped devoutly, performed ornate rituals, buried their dead with flower petals and never once asked for anything more in return than for spring to follow winter – but now it was obvious beyond all doubt that every god who lived in the sky had abandoned them to die,

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