Mark Edward Hall

Darkness, my latest short story is now available for .99 on Smashwords.  Just click on the cover image and like magic you’re there.

Here’s a teaser:

DARKNESS

It’s all yours now. You own it. . .

The man did not know what that phrase meant any more than he had four days ago when he had come awake in the woods injured and afraid with it cycling through his head.

It’s all yours now. You own it. . .

He raised his head up and sniffed the air. For one brief moment of pure exaltation he thought he smelled smoke. He tried to scream into the forest but he was weak and the sound that it made choked in his throat and died there.

He sagged down onto the old railroad bed and sobbed. It had been too good to be true. The wonderfully sweet aroma of wood smoke was now gone, if it had ever been there in the first place.

The wind was moving in the trees and the sound it made was similar to that of a rushing stream. Another of nature’s tricks. The wilderness was rife with them. There was no reason to anything here. He was lost in a lost world where rationality had taken a permanent vacation. He would most likely die out here in this great chameleon forest where unspeakable shapes roamed, where the unimaginable could materialize at any moment and become tangible, where creatures of wickedness and dread would swiftly rip the flesh from ones bones, feast on it, and leave the rotted remains for vultures and worms. There was no discrimination out here, no distinction between man and beast, good and evil. It was the ultimate class system. The fit survived, the weak simply did not. It would be easier to put a gun to one’s own head and pull the trigger. Certainly more humane. If only he had a gun.

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