Free Rise the Dark by Michael Koryta

of his right. Her eyes had the tender but firm expression of a good mother assuring her child that there were no monsters, and it was time to trust the dark and get some rest.
    She said, “You are correct, Markus. Your role in all of it matters. It will matter—and it already did.”
    Her touch put an electric heat through him that he wanted to deny, but he didn’t move his hand away. She was leaning forward, a posture that pressed her breasts high against her tank top.
    “The answers you need won’t come from me,” she said. “You’ve got to believe that. But I can still provide them.”
    “How does that work?” Mark said. His voice sounded the way steel wool felt.
    “They’ll come from your wife,” she said. Then she squeezed his hand tighter. “I’ll need to let her enter me, do you see? Once she makes contact…I become the conduit. And you’ll have all that you want then.”
    She leaned closer, her chest nearly touching his face. “You don’t want to believe in that, I know. It’s not your way. But you’ll have to. I can’t tell you anything about Garland Webb. I can’t tell you anything about what happened. But Lauren can. Of course she can.”
    Mark was silent. She rubbed her thumb lightly over the back of his hand, and when she spoke again, her voice had the same caressing feel.
    “I’m a channel, Markus. A conduit for energy. When we return to the house, the rest will be your choice, not mine. If you want the truth, you’ll need to let me open myself for Lauren. And once I have…you’ll need to believe that she’s within me. Will you be able to do that?”
    “I’ll try.”
    She nodded and squeezed his hand again. “That’s all that you can do. So let’s try together, shall we? We’ll go back to the house, and we’ll find your wife.”
    She released his hand and climbed down from the bench, and he rose and followed her back through the moonlit streets.

11
    T he big house was dark and there was light in the windows of the guesthouse behind it, where Mark expected to go, but Dixie led him up the porch of the old home.
    “I thought this was Myron’s,” he said. “Your tenant. The man in the big truck.”
    She frowned. “My tenant lives there.” She pointed to the guesthouse. She used a key to turn the ancient lock, then pushed the door open and smiled reassuringly at Mark.
    “You’ll need to accept the darkness.”
    “What?”
    “It helps. Trust me on this. We can have candlelight, but nothing more. Not if you want to hear from your wife. From Lauren.”
    The way she said the name was musical, and it hurt him. I take thee, Lauren…
    She hooked one index finger through his belt loop and tugged him forward. “Don’t be scared, now.”
    In truth, he was a little scared. Everything, from the sound of the lock ratcheting back to the smell of the place, age-old dust and mildew, was unappealing, but there was more to it too. Sparks of concern, flickers at the edge of his consciousness like orbs.
    Bad energy.
    Mark told himself that the sources of that energy were pretty damn clear—when you blended Myron Pate and Garland Webb and this strange town, how could the house feel anything but bad?
    That was to intellectualize it, though, and as Mark stepped inside that house with Dixie Witte, there was nothing intellectual or rational about the negative charge he felt; it was pure emotion, something primal, something that would have told his ancient ancestors, You need to run now .
    Just in front of them a staircase led to the second floor, a window at the landing illuminating them. To the left a living room stretched out and blended into a dining room. Dixie hadn’t turned on any lights and the furniture stood around them in shadows. Then she slipped away from him and in seconds was on the landing halfway up the stairs.
    “Markus?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Coming.”
    The stairs creaked. The wood felt soft, yielding. Dixie Witte waited on the landing, and Mark was glad, because