Devils in the Dark
(The Devil in Miss Drake's Class, 1)
Marcus Damanda
16+ / horror/paranormal/27K
To most of the Facebook 15, bullying Audrey Bales was just a game—until two deep cuts with a Swiss army knife changed everything forever. Audrey didn’t want attention anymore. After five weeks at Fairview High School, Audrey wanted to die.
The doctors did the only thing they could with her: they put her away.
But in Fairview, Virginia, the nightmare is only beginning. The chat session had not gone unobserved. The Facebook 15 have drawn the attention of an ancient evil that lives only to punish those who would prey upon the weak.
They are the ghosts of 1,000 dead children—1,000 suicides—and their master…
Their master likes Audrey Bales.
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Excerpt:
Underneath the blackened veil of her powered-off monitor, the comments kept coming, kept taunting her.
The observer had stopped watching. He leaned back in his chair, head upturned to the ceiling, eyes closed, still eating. The overripe apple had a worm in it, and he sucked it down.
He projected his sight outward, miles and miles from his little home. He didn’t know where he was anymore.
Somebody’s house. An empty room. A closet.
Here he first saw the girl, the one they were tormenting. Her Facebook icon had shown only a skull and crossbones. In real life, she might have been pretty, if she had not worked so hard to hide it.
Familiar too. Something in her eyes and her lips.
She was close, very close, to a bad decision.
She was imagining the ghost of her brother and talking to it, opening boxes that contained his possessions. She listened to him speak words the observer could not hear. Oh, he wished he could. From this distance all he could hear was the pain inside of her, the loneliness, screams within whispers. An oncoming storm.
It made him angry on her behalf.
He returned his gaze to the real world of his apartment. The five of them were still chatting, their cruel banter punctuated by internet abbreviations and emoticons, calling for Audrey-Bear to say something, say something….
More joined the chat.
He shook his head.
You deserve to die, he thought. All of you.
****
Audrey returned to her bedroom and closed the door. This time, she broke a house rule and locked it. She put the blanket back in place and thumbed the monitor back on.
It was nearly one in the morning, yet the number of people on Cody’s page had tripled. Stranger still was the activity coming through on her end.
She gazed in bewilderment.
Benny Talbot has sent you a friend request.
Heather Roberts has sent you a friend request.
Ally Watson has sent you a friend request.
Gabriel Daniels has sent you a friend request.
Eleven requests, all kids from school. Most of them had sent her personal messages too. Some were fake-friendly, some openly mocking. Most pretended to rally in her support, as if they had somehow stumbled upon this Internet lynching by accident, all at the same time, and were offended by it. A virtual party had gathered in Cody’s little corner of cyberspace, and Audrey was the game they were playing.
Had Maggie called or texted them all out of bed?
“Creative,” she said. “You’re really good at this.”
She wasn’t crying anymore. In fact, she was perfectly calm. With the ghost of her brother standing by her side, she set his old Swiss Army knife—he’d gotten it for Scouts, before he had quit—next to the keyboard.
Click Accept, her brother said. For all of them. Now, before they give up and start to log off.
She accepted them all, and the result was chat room bedlam. The comments came faster than she could read. Evidently this was the very height of hilarity.
And, naturally, as soon as she had accepted them all, one-by-one, they unfriended her, and posted.
Just kidding!
Sry! Changed my mind!
What an idiot!
Inspired, she clicked the Like button over every comment. Then, ignoring the perplexed responses to that maneuver, she got to work.
She retrieved the gym shirt from under her bed. Most days this particular item of attire would have remained a crumpled ball in her P.E. locker after school, but she’d had to wear it all day, and so it had come home with her.
“Turn your head, Alex,” she said, as if he were really there.
And as if he were really there, he answered. Not looking, not looking.
Once she had the shirt on and smoothed it out, she sat back at her desk, got out her cell phone, tied her hair in a tail, and took a picture of herself.
****
When the first picture appeared on Cody’s page, the observer knew exactly what was coming. He’d seen it before. The details differed each time, but the common threads were easily picked out: theatrics, spite, spectacle—and from the other end, disbelief. Then there would be panic, frantic attempts to undo the damage, and afterward, there would be remorse.
From most of them.
The picture was off-center. The girl was smiling, posing. The mascara tracks on her face looked like war paint.
Val: OMG, she’s postin selfies!
Cody: Give us a twerk, emo.
How they didn’t see what was coming, the observer could not fathom. But that was part of the pattern too. Bullies, as a rule, didn’t get it until it was too late—for the victim, or less frequently, for themselves.
The observer was truly torn. On the one hand, if she went through with it, she’d set him free. He had made contact with her, though she didn’t know it, and he was the oldest within the host. After many, many years, it was his turn, and he would finally learn what lay beyond this purgatory. But on the other hand, he felt bad for her. He really did.
“Let’s go,” he said to the screen. The suspense was killing him. “What’s next, Audrey?”
A second picture came up even as the first was being liked and shared by nearly everyone on the page. This one silenced most of them.
Audrey was holding an unfolded pocket knife against her cheek with one hand while the other took the picture, still smiling, tilting her head.
At first, the only comment came from Maggie: Drama. Whatever.
Audrey responded: Stick around. This is for your benefit.
Everything slowed down, then. Time rolled out like an empty rug, the Facebook page inert and dead. Minutes passed with nothing.
Then, Val: Audrey?
Still, nothing.
Val again: Audrey, don’t be dumb. Come on.
Five minutes became ten.
Maggie: She went to bed. She wants us to worry all night. As if we would.
After fifteen minutes of relative inactivity, the final picture appeared.
*****
Author Bio:
Marcus Damanda lives in Woodbridge, Virginia with his cat, Shazam. At various times throughout his life, he played bass guitar for the garage heavy metal band.
Mother’s Day, wrote for The Dale City Messenger, and published editorials in The Potomac News and The Freelance Star. Currently, while not plotting his next foray into fictitious suburban mayhem, he spoils his nieces and nephews and teaches middle school English.
Find Marcus Damanda here:
Guest Post by Marcus Demanda
The Idea Behind The Novel & The Perfect Dream Cast
DEVILS IN THE DARK, and the trilogy it launches, was written shortly after an agent rejected my work, saying, “You’re a talented writer. I might sell you, but I won’t sell your vampires.”
It’s the first non-vampire book I’ve written in ten years, and my goal in its composition was simple: tell a story no one has ever heard before. I knew it would be a horror story, and I knew the target audience would be older teenagers—but at the outset, that’s all I had.
Real-life issues with family, along with similar issues I have to deal with as a teacher, led me to the idea of cyberbullying being at the story’s core. What if a kid was driven nearly to suicide? And what if that kid had unknowingly attracted the attention of a thousand ghosts that really had, as children, taken their own lives?
Oh, yeah, I thought. Let’s go with that.
If I could cast THE DEVIL IN MISS DRAKE’S CLASS, the whole trilogy, as a movie, I'd love to see Maisie Williams in the role of our bullied hero, Audrey Bales, and Thomas Brody-Sangster in the role of Jack Maddox, master of the thousand ghosts. I know those are both GAME OF THRONES choices, but honestly, that's who I see. Williams has the full range of pathos and spunk in her acting repertoire, and Brody-Sangster conjures mystery and dread like he simply sweats it out on a hot day.
In a few years, I imagine Shailene Woodley would be old enough to play the relatively young teacher, Miss Drake. She’s the most popular teacher in the school, even though there are secrets and dark shadows in her past, and I can totally see Woodley pulling off both of those character aspects in her performance.
Give me the old, creepy rock star Meatloaf to play the equally creepy Mr. Downing. Meanwhile, Amandla Stenberg would be absolutely terrific as Monica Adams.
In my fantasy world, I'd take Linda Blair back to her 13th birthday and ask her to play Gale Hastings. Such possibilities, both with her sweetness and her ... other side.
A guy can only dream, you know?
***Giveaway: 1 ecopy of Devils in the Dark to a lucky commenter on any of the participating blogs.
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