Jim Douglas awakes from a dream-filled sleep. He listens, nerves tingling, but all is quiet. South and east of the Douglas place, four section lines away, Lyle Cottrell wakes. He, too, listens for some sound that might have disturbed his sleep.
Lyle climbs off his bare mattress, pulls on his overalls and boots, then steps outside in the light of a false dawn. The elderly man surveys his acreage. The outstanding feature of his land is metal junk accumulated over the decades. Some folks collect stamps, or build ships in bottles. Lyle collects junk for his salvage business.
He was married once, but his wife died. Since then, old Lyle hires himself helpers like Danny Valo. Danny is just the latest in a long line of men who've worked at the yard. As Lyle looks out over his domain, he spots something across the road and up on top of the hill. Something that does not belong. Something odd shaped and shining in the glare of the morning sun.
Cottrell climbs the hill and circles the strange object. He knows it doesn't belong to him. It's metal, all right, and it looks new. The box is about eight feet tall, and tapered down to a base that is a foot or two smaller than its squared-off top. Before he can leave the hill, the front of the thing shimmered and Lyle finds himself looking into the face of a remarkable presence.
"There'd once been a jogger living in the hills around Lyle's house, and at first Lyle thought that's who the man in the box was. But a second look got rid of that idea. This man looked like he was rich, Lyle thought. The clothes looked like a rich man's clothes, even if they were kind of like what that jogger used to wear when he ran. Red shorts, a T-shirt that looked
more like linen than cotton, clean white socks, white tennis shoes with a lot of triangles and black squares all over the built-up soles. And then there was that gold chain around his neck. He had a good tan, too, but it wasn't the kind you got from working outside."
Lyle glanced away from the man to the inside of the box. "It seemed to recede far into the distance. He thought he saw tiny lights, twinkling like faraway stars, away back behind the man."
The man in the box called himself Kard. Only later would preacher Fount Finn point out that you could rearrange the letters in the man's name to spell Dark! Of course, by then, it was very late in the game and town folk from Langford and the nearby countryside had been pulled into an experience none could have imagined possible.
Kard tempted them with cash money, special favors, and fed on their fears and deepest secrets. Then he appealed to their curiosity of the unknown by saying, "It's an experiment science." Only Jim Douglas thought about the possible costs of Kard's promises.
Before you could say the name "Jayson Drak," boxes started showing up all over the town. One by one the people came face to face with their own worst selves. Beguiled by avarice and desire for Kard's special favors, they risked losing everything good in their lives. Many actually asked to enter Kard's box and you only had to ask to gain admittance. At least that's how it started out. Jim Douglas found out even if you didn't ask you might find yourself facing your own hidden demons inside Kard's dark box.
Wooley conjures up a tale for the 21st Century in "Dark Within." It is a story that does not confine itself to one genre. If I had to name just one, it would be psychological thriller, because rather than a spine-tingler, this is a mind-tingler. "Dark Within" is a straight told story with characters you care about even though you find some of them a bit naive.
You might asked yourself is Wooley's tale just a story or is it a Pandora's techno-box, a look into the future, an adventure we all could face sometime, somewhere, in virtual reality?
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(Jones is a published writer & literary critic)
**SIDEBAR:
John Wooley has written novels, nonfiction, screenplays, journalism, and documentaries. His other books include the seminal horror classics "Old Fears," and "Death's Door," written with Ron Wolfe, and "How to Make it in the Music Business," written with music impresario Jim Halsey. Wooley lives in Oklahoma, where he is working on his next novel.
COPYRIGHT DECEMBER 26, 2000, PATRICIA A. JONES, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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