The Nightling: Darkness Within

by Danae Ayusso

  Written by Danae Ayusso

  Copyright © 2019 Geeks on Ink Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 Danae Ayusso

  All rights reserved

  This story is copyrighted and property rights of Danae Ayusso. This is for personal entertainment use only, any reselling, redistribution or publishing is strictly prohibited by law. This story may not be reproduced, distributed, modified or reposted to other websites.

  All characters and situations are fictional. Any similarities to an actual person or persons and situations are purely coincidental and rather impressive.

  Cover stock art: Haunted Forest by artshock

  Font by OpiaDesigns

  Font by Natanael Gama

  Font by JROH Creative

  Layout by Geeks on Ink Publishing

  For more information about the series and the author please check out

  www.danaeayusso.com www.Geeks-on-Ink.com and on Facebook

  There are those moments in a girl’s life when she sits back and says, “Dang, I did a good job!”

  Sadly, for me those moments are practically non-existent.

  I think the last time I said that, that I gave myself two-enthusiastic-thumbs up for a job well done, was three years ago. That was when I safely and successfully paralleled parked for the first, and only, time. It was a job well done. I was proud of myself.

  It should have been the start to a great day!

  Sadly, the day went horribly downhill from there.

  When I came out of the coffee shop, where my cup had leaked chai latte all over my ivory sweater and white pants, effectively making the worst first impression of my life, helping to raise that blind date to the top five worst dates of my life, I found my car had been towed. In my victory over parallel parking I neglected to notice that the sole reason why that spot was open on the crowded street was because of the bright red fire hydrant with the NO PARKING sign above it.

  Sadly, today made that day look like one of the top five days of excellence in my life.

  What should have started out as one of those rare, and epically awesome, I did a good job things started a world changing system of events that has turned my lack luster, and incredibly mundane, life into something I could have never imagined experiencing in a million lifetimes.

  It turned me to the dark side…

  Where, coincidentally, they don’t have cookies.

  As how all of these stories go, it was a dark, stormy night.

  Why wouldn’t it be?

  The weather channel said it would be a clear, warm night, the perfect night for gazing at the stars. Two hours after the sun set, the sky filled with charcoal clouds and they seemingly burst as one, mockingly following me as I ran for cover.

  Normally when I take in a show at the park I wasn’t dressed to impress, and I wished I wasn’t then. That night I was supposed to meet, yet another, crappy blind date for a late night matinee on the grass. Of course the jerk stood me up, and the outfit I bought for said date got ruined in the rain. Never did I imagine pale pink silk would turn transparently sheer when wet, and it sure in the heck wasn’t the best day to wear that particular bra which left very little to the imagination, and I shouldn’t have worn Grandma’s heels, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

  Under a large maple tree I stood, trying to use the canopy of leaves above as a nature friendly umbrella.

  It didn’t work very well.

  Obviously Mother Nature had it out for me as well.

  I stood there shaking and shivering uncontrollably, looking around, trying to figure out where in the heck I was and how I got so dang turned around. It wasn’t as if the park was all that big, but somehow that night it turned into the green and lush Sahara Desert of the Pacific Northwest in the middle of a downpour!

  Sadly, my biggest complaints of the evening to that point was that I ruined the vintage silk slip dress I had splurged on—a purchase that was supposed to make me feel special and pretty, since chocolate only adds pounds and never long term contentment—and that if I died of pneumonia the jerk that stood me up better feel bad.

  Yes, those were the two biggest complaints I had.

  My priorities were all messed up, I’m well aware of that…

  Now.

  Again, it’s that hindsight is twenty-twenty thing.

  “I’m going to kick that weatherman’s butt if I ever see him in person,” I grumbled under my breath, rubbing my hands up and down my arms to try to warm up from the friction.

  I was weighing the options; if I made a break for it and ran the six blocks home, would I get struck by lightning as I crossed the park?

  The risk was great with my lack of luck.

  Or do I stand there and wait out the rain and catch a cold, possibly dying a slow, agonizing death care of pneumonia?

  The lightning thing was looking better and better by the second.

  Where most would say it’s a one in a billion chance, with me it’s a one in ten. Three times I’ve nearly been struck by lightning, and one time struck resulting in a week long coma.

  Most would say that surviving was luck, but being struck is the opposite of luck.

  I have the worst luck in the world!

  In case you don’t believe me, what happens next will pretty much sum it up in one nice, wet, bloody package.

  “Do you talk to yourself often?” an unfamiliar voice amusingly asked from above me.

  I jumped, startled, slipped on the wet grass and mud, and ended up sprawled out on the ground, squinting up into the darkness.

  “Now that, I did not see coming,” he said with a chuckle.

  Was there a particular protocol for this type of situation?

  Typically you scream or something, right?

  At the very least you run.

  All were very agreeable suggestions.

  But at that moment, I couldn’t remember how to do any of the above mentioned.

  Yes, I said it, I completely forgot how to form words or make noise, or run for that matter.

  None of those things were difficult, and yet I couldn’t remember how to do even one of them!

  I still don’t know if it was fear or just stupidity, but I stayed on the ground sprawled out like some kind of mentally impaired girl in a ruined outfit.

  The unmistakable sound feet make when landing in soft mud made me shriek, effectively using the last of the breath I was holding, and I struggled to focus on the moving shadow that came to loom over me.

  At that moment I should have screamed.

  Screaming would have been the smart thing to do, but as I’ve already established I had a total blonde moment of epic proportions, so I just gasped, struggling to catch my breath.

  “Such eyes… Are you scared, Little Girl?” he mused, darkly.

  And suddenly I didn’t need to breathe.

  The jerk just called me what my stepdad used to call me, and that was the wrong thing to call me.

  “Little girl me again and you’ll regret it,” I warned.

  “Little Girl,” he mockingly sang.

  In all fairness, I did warn him.

  I started kicking at him from the ground.

  I’m sure I looked ridiculous and was completely ruining my dress and shoes, but disgusting men that called me Little Girl wasn’t something I would tolerate.

  When my foot connected, he yelped like a dog that got its tail caught under a rocking chair.

  Internally I smiled; finally I had found my big girl pants when faced with a creep.

  “You bitch!” he hissed and suddenly he was on top of me…

  And that’s when I screamed.

  I ask myself, why did it take some jerk scaring me, nearly to death—the full death
came later—and calling me stepdad’s pet name, getting kicked, in what I later found out were his balls, and attacking me to finally get me to scream?

  I really should have done that two seconds into the whole ordeal, and I still kick myself in the butt for it.

  Usually people want details, all the gory, bloody details, but I’d rather skip over those.

  Allow me to paraphrase: fangs, biting, drinking of blood, and being buried alive and left for dead.

  Does that effectively paint the not-so-pretty picture for you?

  Like I said, I don’t really want to get into the details, mainly because the Devil’s in the details, literally, and the Devil was the one that bit, buried, and had the audacity to walk off and leave me since he wasn’t siring, he was trying to hide a dang body…

  Mine!

  And that’s where my lovely story begins…

  At the end.

  The rain had stopped just after midnight.

  I knew this because, sadistically enough, the film I was stood up for was a double feature of The Ghost and Mrs. Muri and The Uninvited, and even lightning, rain, and murder wouldn’t stop the old guy in the projector shed from rolling the credits. The final reel wouldn’t have ended until midnight. With the rolling of the credits the annoyingly constant pitter and pattering that each drop of rain made around me ceased their hollow assault on my ears.

  Every time I tried to open my eyes, dirt assaulted them, and each breath I tried to take was choked out by dirt, grass, mud and rocks.

  I was in more trouble than I initially thought I was.

  I was buried alive, by all accounts, and ironically it irritated me more than it freaked me out. If I was irritated that meant I was alive and could claw my way out.

  To the Goddess I silently prayed that the jerk was lazy and buried me in a shallow grave.

  Thankfully the jerk was lazy.

  It was the first luck I had all night….

  And the only.

  When my head broke through the ground, I gasped and choked, struggling to catch my breath but something felt off about it.

  I didn’t need it.

  Human existence dictated that you inhale and exhale in order to survive. It wasn’t rocket science. But the involuntary action was just that, involuntary. I didn’t need to do it in order to survive.

  That should have been freaking me out, thinking about it now really freaks me out, but at the time it wasn’t. I was more irritated that I missed the movie and ruined my new outfit, the assault and attempted murder was a close second though.

  Yes, I have issues.

  That should be well established by now.

  Once partially freed from the shallow grave, I sat there half-buried, in essentially a mud puddle, and looked around, trying to get my bearings. It was difficult to focus at first; dirt in the eyes can do that I’ve heard, and this was confirmation of that. All around me were leaning granite slabs and crumbling marble statues, and it smelled weird.

  “Where in the heck am I?” I mumbled. “I heard the movie, even under mud and dirt I heard it. I can’t be that far from the park.”

  When the sky above cleared, leaving a diamond studded sapphire canvas that was all expansive in a beautiful celestial sense, it clearly illuminated everything around me.

  The leaning slabs of granite were, in actuality, headstones and altar tombs, and the crumbling marble were painstakingly carved centerpieces and statues marking graves of importance.

  “You sick jerk!” I shrieked once it registered with my extremely slow brain that I was in the middle of an old, neglected cemetery. “What kind of sick freak buries someone alive?!” I demanded.

  Of course no one answered.

  By the looks of the place, I was the first person to have been buried there in centuries…

  Not that it mattered at the moment, but my mind was all over the place for obvious reasons.

  There was something about the place that was morbidly beautiful yet creepy at the same time. No stranger to cemeteries myself, though I had never been buried in one before, there was a sense of beauty about them, and this one was no different. If it weren’t for being assaulted, buried, and left for dead, I would have made it a point to return later to do some grave rubbings.

  Again, I was getting distracted and wasn’t in the best frame of mind.

  “Ugh! As if this night couldn’t get any worse,” I grumbled, kicking out of the mud and grass to the dirt barely covering my legs before crawling out of the shallow grave. “Eight-inches, really?” I complained. “I wasn’t even good enough for a foot of dirt, was I? Dang it, where is my cape and shoes?!”

  Even more irritated than I was before, I dug through the mud and dirt on my hands and knees, looking for my favorite shoes, my grandmother’s Rangoni t-strap heels, but they were nowhere to be seen. The cape style shawl I got from a thrift store and didn’t have sentimental value, but the shoes were irreplaceable.

  I screamed in frustration, punching and slapping the mud I was crawling around in, covering myself in even more of it.

  I knew it was a mistake to wear those shoes, especially on a blind date that I wasn’t even interested in going on, but they matched the vintage vibe of the slip-turned-dress I splurged on for tonight.

  It was yet another thing to add to the ever-growing list of things to be unbelievably irate over that evening, but it wouldn’t be the last.

  Eventually I gave up on trying to find the only piece of my grandma that I had left; I ignored the tears staining my cheeks, and crawled out of the shallow grave-puddle.

  “Grandma would want me to be strong,” I reminded myself, trying to give myself a little pep talk.

  It wasn’t working.

  Carefully I maneuvered around the crumbling headstones and statues, having to brace myself against them as I went. My body was mind-numbingly cold yet it felt as if my blood was on fire. My head was a swirling mess of incoherent thoughts and irritation, and I was consumed with trying to process all of the unfamiliar senses. My vision was still blurry and coming in and out of focus so fast than I couldn’t make sense of what I was trying focus on; I don’t think the mud and dirt was to blame for that though.

  “I can do this,” I whispered, fighting the vertigo causing the horizon to sway.

  When the falling wrought iron fencing pretending to keep encroaching woods back came into view, I squealed with happiness—I do that often when excited—and stumbled towards it as quickly as my muddy legs could carry me. And of course, I caught my toes on a headstone and fell into the unyielding arms of a granite angel. I started to scream in frustration and pain, my toes were throbbing and possibly broken, when the angel’s head tilted to the side to regard me.

  The scream of frustration turned into a scream of fear that got caught in my throat before she winked at me.

  “This isn’t happening… Not again,” I groaned. “It isn’t real. It isn’t real,” I chanted. “Polpetto said you aren’t real.”

  That’s what my brother used to tell me to do when I was younger and thought monsters were hiding under my bed or were going to get me. When he wasn’t there to protect me, Giovanni said telling the monsters they weren’t real made them not real and it’d protect me from them.

  It had been a while since the monsters tried to get me, and the one that jumped, bit, and buried me alive was the first in months…

  However, usually the monsters didn’t jump, bite, and bury me in a shallow grave.

  “You aren’t real,” I said, carefully pulling myself away from the angel’s arms so not to break the statue. “I’m sorry, but you aren’t real.”

  The angel shrugged as if what I was saying didn’t matter in the least.

  I started to rub my eyes but stopped; I was dirty and it’d only make it worse. Instead I blinked rapidly, trying to clear my vision, and when I looked again, the angel was standing still as a statue, imagine that, in the same position it was in when I initially fell into it.

  “Did I fall down the rabbit ho
le?” I complained.

  Did I neglect to mention that I talk to myself, and sadly answer myself more often than not?

  Grandma called it poor girl’s therapy.

  Usually I’m not a curious person, not in the least, but I was no longer running for the fence line in order to get the heck out of there.

  Instead I was looking around at everything with more interest than warranted.

  I should have been concerned about where I was and how to get home, about the searing in my neck, the fire my blood has become and the freezing that’s accompanying it.

  And I really should have been concerned with the annoying pulling sensation in the back of my mind.

  But I wasn’t.

  I wasn’t even concerned that I was attacked, bitten, buried alive, and left for dead, or that I lost my grandma’s shoes.

  Instead I was completely engrossed with everything around me.

  The darkened moss covering the tombs and gravestones appeared to be moving in waves of luminescent greens, browns, and violets. The thorny vines creeping along each vertical surface were slithering, wrapping and contracting around everything they could get a hold of. The air tasted funny, like ancient death I suppose, mixed with an earthen musk, flowers, decay, rust, mold and pollen. The tangy bitterness of the grass and woodsy flavor of everything else coated my tongue in a strange pungency that wasn’t entirely repulsive.

  Normally I would have covered my nose and ran—spores are the enemy, mia bisnonna used to say—but it was strangely inviting.

  I didn’t mind nature, but I strongly believed spores and pollen were the enemy.

  Instead of shying away from the slithering and glowing foliage, I caressed each as I went. My fingers danced across everything and the differences in textures captivated me, causing a sensory overload that nearly dropped me.

  I’ve done ecstasy before, once and only once at a rave in the park when I was twenty, but this was a million times more touchy and feely’esque! It all felt different and there was a strange humming, like a pulsing, coming from everything…even the tombstones! It was peculiar and could have been from a concussed state, but there was something about it that was almost addictive.

  I wiggled my fingers and the tendrils rolled over and I tickled them; it made me giggle.