Free DARK COUNTY by Kit Tinsley

want to live there again.
    I became ever more obsessed with the house by the marsh, at least twice a week I would drive down there, just to make sure that it was still all boarded up and secure. Having been one myself, I knew full well what the kids round here were like. A boarded up house is tempting for teenagers, they liked to try and get in, either looking for ghosts or just to trash the place. Not that I cared if they wrecked the place, I just didn’t want anyone going in there for their own safety. There was something about having direct contact with the place that infected you with its darkness. It had happened to both Danny and Rob, and I felt it myself, every time I went down there. It was a pulling sensation in the pit of my stomach, a desire in my head to just take a quick look inside, but I fought it, knowing that if I entered the house once it would gradually draw me in, corrupting me as it had my friends.
     
    On my thirtieth birthday, I had a surprise phone call from Wayne, asking me if I wanted to go out for a celebratory drink. I had only spoken to Wayne twice since Danny’s funeral, and one of those times was at Rob’s. I agreed to go and meet him, though. I had been feeling a little low and thought that a drink with one of my oldest friends might pick me up.
    It started as a pleasant afternoon. We went into town to the gastro pub by the river and sat there catching up. Wayne said that he only had a few more months left in the army and that he and his family would be moving back to the area. He showed me pictures of the girls, who were now eight years old and absolutely beautiful. I told him how much I envied him, his wife, his kids, his place in life. I had drifted along from one relationship to another, most of them toxic from the start. It seemed that no one knew how to deal with my condition, and expecting them to do so was unfair on my part. Career wise I had drifted from one thing to another, never lasting more than a year, usually a lot less. I started every job with great enthusiasm, but then a low period would hit, and I would lose all interest in everything. The jobs I didn’t get fired from, I quit.
    We talked about the old days and, of course, about Danny and Rob, not the murderers they became in adulthood, but the kids we had known. These were happy memories, which had us both crying with laughter.
    ‘I just can’t understand how they turned out the way they did,’ Wayne said, souring the mood. ‘Especially not Rob, he was always so together.’
    ‘Yeah, I know,’ I said.
    I didn’t know whether to tell him my theory, that something dark and twisted had got inside us when we all looked into that house. Would he understand? He had seen the house, and been as afraid of it as we had, but would he believe such a wild story, especially from a man who had spent the last four years on antipsychotic drugs?
    ‘Sometimes I wonder if it was that old house by the marsh,’ Wayne said, as though reading my thoughts. I looked at him open mouthed, shocked that he had made that connection as well.
    ‘What makes you say that?’ I asked, not wanting to give away too much too soon.
    ‘Sometimes I dream about that house. I know it’s long gone now, Rob saw to that, but in my dreams it’s still there.’
    ‘In a way I think it is,’ I said. ‘It just looks different now.’
    ‘You remember that night we first found the place?’ Wayne asked.
    ‘Like it was yesterday,’ I said.
    ‘I think something got hold of Danny when he looked through that crack in the door. Something that made him do those things to those girls.’
    I couldn’t believe that Wayne, who had been away for so long, had the exact same theory as me.
    ‘Then Rob looked in there, that night after Danny’s funeral,’ Wayne continued.
    ‘How did you know about that?’ I asked, shocked. I had only learned that from Rob after the house was destroyed.
    ‘I was with him,’ Wayne said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘He rang me up, half cut,