Nightlight

by Michael Cadnum

  She looked, sinking to her knees.

  “His grandfather,” Paul began.

  “I had always imagined,” said Lise weakly, “that such bodies were in a better state of preservation.”

  “Colma is a very damp place,” said Paul.

  “Apparently so.”

  “Damp all year round, really.” Paul had a memory he did not want to mention: the body he had seen exhumed, years before.

  He put the folders back into the box, closed the box, and locked it. “So what?” he said at last. “We knew Len had a very strange hobby. He’s taken up portraits. Portraits of the deceased. It’s a harmless enough pastime.”

  “You forgot this.”

  The scalpel was icy in his fingers. It gleamed in the electric light, and he saw the reflected eye, his own eye, along its perfect blade.

  “We are in the hands of an insane man,” said Lise simply.

  “I don’t know about insane, exactly.”

  “You have a lack of imagination.”

  “You have too much.”

  “I don’t mean the ability to see things that don’t exist. I mean the ability to see what is. The power to comprehend what is implied. That is what intelligence really is. You are pretending to be stupid.”

  “Len has a fascination with death. Not a surprise. He has a fixation on the corpse, such as it is, of his grandfather. A sort of ancestor worship. A lot of people have a morbid streak.”

  “I’m leaving. I’m not spending another night in this place.”

  “All right. Supposing, just for a moment, that Len is utterly mad. He’s not here. He’s gone. We are all alone here.”

  The light from the ceiling dimmed, stuttered bright again, and then died.

  The entire house was dark.

  24

  Sounds seemed suddenly louder. The pounding of his own heart, the heavy rain against the window. He began to see as his eyes drank in the dim evening light, and he felt his way to the wall switch.

  He snapped it on and off, idly. “Well,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Lines are always going down during these storms. We have the fireplace, and I think I saw a flashlight in one of the kitchen drawers.”

  “I’m not spending the night here.”

  “You’re going to swim the flood? You’ll drown.”

  “I’ll sleep in the car.”

  “No.”

  “It’s better than in here.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think it’s safe.”

  “Not safe?”

  “The bank might collapse. Get eaten away. And wash the car away.”

  “I’ll move the car to high ground. What’s the matter? You agree with me, don’t you? You see that we’re in trouble.”

  He studied what he could see of her face, a pale oblong across the room. “It’s a little Volkswagen. It just doesn’t seem strong enough.”

  “For what?”

  Paul did not speak for a while. He found a chair and sat slowly. “I don’t think we should panic. We should behave like rational people. Sleeping in the car is a stupid thing to do. It’s too much an admission of terror.” He made a short, joyless laugh.

  “I admit it. I’m terrified.”

  “We have to act as a team. We can’t disagree with each other.”

  “Then we have to agree on what it is we face here.”

  Paul stepped carefully into the living room and knelt at the fireplace. A box of matches rattled in his hand, and he wadded a sheet of newspaper. “I don’t think Len has lived in this cabin for maybe a week. Or two. Or even longer.”

  “But he left his camera. His toothbrush.”

  “We’ll argue forever. We don’t know. We are ignorant. His whereabouts are unknown. Some people shiver when they hear the word unknown. You could call a scary book The Unknown and people would be terrified just of the title.”

  A wooden match struck with a spurt of fine, white sparks, and a flame danced. Paul touched it to the crumpled paper, and the fire spread like black ink across the newsprint. Lise sighed and sat beside him, watching the fire.

  “We’ll be all right,” Paul said, beginning to believe it himself. “Len is weird. We have no reason to believe he’s dangerous.”

  “I know he is,” she said softly.

  Paul knew it too. The dream told him that. He had never paid any attention to his dreams before, and had always felt that people who preoccupied themselves with dreams were foolish. But this one was different.

  “There is something you should know,” he said at last. “Something I haven’t told you. About the nightmares that I’ve had. They are the same as the ones you have had. A house. Like this place. Dark, like this. Someone in the house, walking slowly through it, as a paralysis grips you and you can’t move or even cry out.”

  She looked into the fire.

  “Aunt Mary has had the same dream. I put it out of my mind. I thought it was a coincidence. Well, it was. But I thought it was a meaningless coincidence.”

  “I don’t want to stay here.”

  He felt weary. He couldn’t argue anymore. “All right. We’ll sleep in the car. I think it’s a crazy thing to do, but I can’t argue.”

  “You knew about these dreams, but you didn’t tell me.”

  “They seemed meaningless.”

  “What else do you know that you aren’t telling me?”

  “I know that if we leave this house he can come back into it.”

  “That doesn’t matter. We can stay in the car for days.”

  “It’s awfully small.”

  “We’ll only spend the nights there. And it can’t rain forever.”

  Paul rose. “All right. Here’s your raincoat. We’ll sleep in the car.”

  Before leaving the cabin he stood before the fire. It threw huge shadows around the room, and his own shadow was a dark, quaking giant that flowed across the floor. He knelt quickly and put his hand around the handle of the hatchet. It wrenched out of the block of wood with a squeak, and he examined it in the firelight.

  The wedge-shaped head was battered, and the shaft of the handle had once been covered with red paint. Now, the blond grain of the wood was exposed. The hatchet was the sort of tool that accumulated punishment, belonging to no one, used for one, quick violent act, then cast aside until the next task.

  Paul tucked the hatchet into his belt, and covered it with his raincoat, zipping the nylon jacket, so Lise would not see it.

  She had found the flashlight in the kitchen. It threw a brown oblong across the wet redwood needles, and spears of rain glittered in its beam from moment to moment. Their breath made clouds.

  The river clattered somewhere ahead of them, and a wet branch whipped Paul’s face, soaking him. The flashlight beam illuminated a fungus erupting from the side of a redwood, pale and moist as bone.

  Lise stopped.

  Ahead of them, tire tracks gouged the mud like claw marks. Rain pocked the slash-shaped puddles that had formed in the tracks, water as brown as milk chocolate. The light from the flashlight expanded upward until rain fell in its beam, fine and impeccable as a shower of needles. Then the beam tightened to a circle at their feet.

  One of them had to say it, although it was so obvious they could not breathe for a moment.

  Paul stepped forward and crouched, touching the long sierra of mud along one edge of a tire track. He stood, and turned to face the dimming light of the flashlight. “It’s gone.”

  25

  For a long time rain dripped from the hoods of their rain jackets as they listened to the crash of water through the boulders. Then Paul took the flashlight, and tried to follow the tracks of the car as if it were a wounded beast.

  The ground was rich with a carpet of rust-red redwood needles, and the tracks vanished as if the car had been lifted up into the air. Beads of water stood out on his hand, and long slashes of rain scissored in the beam of light.

  “So someone is still here,”
said Lise.

  “A car thief,” offered Paul.

  “And we go back to the cabin.”

  The one place he did not want to go. But they had no choice. To spend the night in the driving rain seemed not only pointless, but an admission of cowardice. Paul would not allow himself to be afraid.

  He held a branch so she could pass. The cabin hunched before them, a smear of smoke flattening as it left the chimney. “He’s in there,” she breathed.

  “We are a threat to him, too,” said Paul, and he was shocked at the harshness of his voice. “Wherever he is, he doesn’t know what we’ll do.”

  “He knows,” she said.

  Paul snapped off the light. The rain made a high, plastic rattle on their jackets. “If we stay together, and stay calm, we are stronger than he is.”

  “He’s insane,” she said softly. “That gives him a certain animal advantage.”

  “We’re going back into the house, and we will sit in front of the fire, and whatever happens we will take care of each other.” It sounded brave, but neither of them moved.

  Paul did, finally, running in a crouch, gripping the head of the hatchet so it would not dig into his belly. He felt his way along the house, and then fumbled for the flashlight.

  In the dim light, the cut end of a wire gleamed.

  Paul straightened, almost glad. The electricity had not been knocked out by the storm. Someone had severed the wire.

  They paused at the front door, listening, and, as they expected, heard nothing but rain. They stepped inside, and the fire snapped a spark out into the room that turned into a black seed at their feet.

  It was this second coming to the cabin, their second arrival, that made Paul certain that something evil was taking place. The way they looked up, into the ceiling, as if they could see into the rooms above, the way they stood dripping, unable to speak, made him understand that he was ready to fight for his life.

  “We will behave as if we have never felt fear in our lives,” Paul said, unzipping his jacket.

  She saw the hatchet.

  “We shouldn’t expect too much of ourselves,” she said.

  “But now I’m angry.”

  She made a strange smile. “Perhaps it’s the place that is evil.”

  “You can indulge whatever fantasies you like. I’m reheating the beans.”

  “Perhaps the place broke Len, the way it is breaking us.”

  Giving people the same nightmare, thought Paul, wrapping his hand around the black handle of the skillet.

  He wanted the cabin to seem different now, even more menacing and untrustworthy. But here was Lise’s paperback, a detective story acclaimed by newspapers in Baltimore and Denver. Here was the water they had trailed across the floor.

  Here was the camera on the kitchen table.

  26

  There was nearly nothing left.

  A residue. There was only the Voice, and yet I stayed away, wanting what little that was left, and also because even then with His strength in me I was afraid.

  But I came at last. The camera around my neck, running through the dark as a dog might run. I flung myself over the gate, and the iron I carried rang against it, just once. The long cold iron, the crowbar.

  You won’t have to wait, I breathed. Not much longer.

  And the ecstasy blossomed in me, His Voice. The long, powerful Yes breathed into me and through me.

  I was cold. This was the night everything would change. I would have to think clearly, even though so close to the Voice I was trembling, and my breath came and went out of me in bursts.

  Headlights. So suddenly, puncturing the dark.

  A black silhouette crossed before the headlights, far off, and a distant gate clanked open. I huddled. Small, I thought.

  Small and invisible.

  A car’s engine, and the scent of exhaust, just barely. The headlights grew, and then they stopped, and a terrible thing happened, something that slammed me hard into the dark grass.

  Be still, breathed the Voice. And watch him. This man—how little he sees.

  A beam of light played over the stone monuments. The ugly glare bent and straightened as it stroked the stony shapes.

  Then the light fell, and formed an oblong pool. And the pool shifted along the ground, coming closer. The wobble of light was approaching, and there was nothing I could do.

  You see, said the Voice. You see how they are? That is the world of the living. That is the world you and I will escape. Look at how unseeing he is. Unless the light finds something, he will spy nothing but black.

  The light made a sharp hole in the dark, matched by a tear-shape of light on the ground. The footsteps crackled along the sidewalk, and the man—because it was a man, a human, unseeing—passed within an arm’s length of where I had become shadow.

  The man stopped. The light swung far, and then it swung very close, so bright that it seemed to make a sound. The man’s breathing was loud.

  Loud, and slow. The man smelled of cigarette smoke. And I surprised myself by feeling something I would never have anticipated.

  This man, this unknown nightwatchman, this ordinary human, could save me. Even now. If I reached out my hand, or if I said something. Even a whisper. It would only take a whisper.

  Don’t betray me, whispered the Voice. It was more than a whisper. It was a current, and it swept me before it like the briefest scum.

  We belong together.

  Stay still.

  The flashlight traveled through the dark, and the steps receded. The man’s pace, and the slow swing of the pool of light from side to side, spoke of boredom. The man had no special reason to suspect that I was here. He made his way back to the headlights, and then there was only the dark.

  There, said the Voice. You see how he is. A living man, an ordinary human.

  He is not like us.

  A thought flickered in me: I’m human, too.

  The Voice swept me. Even when you were a boy I called to you. Even then I had faith in you. And at last you have come to me. How I love you, Len.

  You have never forsaken me.

  I wept. I was not worthy of His faith in me.

  Come to me, Len. Don’t hesitate another moment. You have made me wait too long.

  But still I did not move. I wanted to be what I was, what I had been, for a few more heartbeats, even as I begged Him to forgive me. I was not worthy of such love.

  Come.

  I trembled.

  Come now.

  The camera was heavy at my chest. The crowbar was black ice. My fingers could not grip it.

  Come, beloved.

  I crawled through the darkness to where He was. To the iron fence that held Him, and the iron gate. I did not know why I wept. I shivered, and, gasping, I worked the heavy, cold crowbar into the gate, and it rang against the black spears. I wasn’t strong enough. No one was strong enough.

  And then I was.

  The gate opened, but caught, and I used all his strength, and then something else, strength that was not mine. With a noise like a bell, the gate opened, and I stumbled inside.

  Come quickly.

  There was a door, a simple, metal door. There was a keyhole. It was nearly too dark to see, but I was not using my own eyes, now. I had the power of the finest lens, a power no human could have.

  Quickly.

  I battered the metal door. It was bright where the iron splintered the coat of paint and rust. I heard my body panting, even growling, with the effort. The door would not give.

  The iron punctured it, and then punctured it again. The door buckled, and the crowbar, knowing exactly what to do, worked its teeth into the bend in the door, and the broken thing opened easily.

  Don’t wait. Hurry.

  Even now, at this last moment, I remembered enough to hesitate. Something held me.

  Hurry.

  It was cold. The floor was slippery with algae and water. I splashed, fumbling; and found the great bronze cold Secret. I fell over it, and wept. I was here.


  At last I was here.

  We will not be mere man. Men are nothing. We will be something supreme over death.

  The iron, the bronze casket, the air were all cold, but I did not shiver. I found the smallest crack, where the Secret was sealed. I leaned against it, panting.

  It was bolted.

  You can do it. You have my strength in you. They are merest slugs of steel, not even threaded. Why are you hesitating?

  The iron did its work. A black split appeared in the casket. A bolt lifted itself out of its socket, and chimed on the floor. Another joined it. These were not human arms. This was not human strength.

  Over death.

  Hurry.

  Another bolt. Until all around the bronze hull there were empty holes where bolts had worked free. I collapsed against the wall. My arms were numb.

  Now.

  The iron clattered where I dropped it. I put both hands against the top half of the husk, and pushed. It did not move. I heaved against it, groaning.

  It did not move. I pushed from all sides, straining. I slipped, and found new footing, but the lid did not move.

  Until at last it squeaked. Just that—a squeal of heavy metal shifting just slightly. Another push, and the lid shifted completely, with a musical, grinding sound.

  At last.

  I trembled.

  Don’t be afraid.

  The camera clicked. This was a good thing—to keep this forever.

  You know what to do now.

  I let the camera fall to the extent of its loop around my neck. But I did not hesitate. I was empty, now. There was nothing left.

  I bent over the casket, and leaned down into the dark Secret. And it was not a secret anymore. I saw what had called me all those years. All those boyhood years, and into manhood.

  Kiss me.

  I kissed the lipless mouth, and reached around the damp body to embrace it. And something breathed from the body into me, and ate through what was left of me, a fire consuming spiderwebs.

  And I would never die.

  27

  Mary had never wanted children. Phil did, of course, but since when did what men want make any difference? “I am pregnant,” she had said simply.

  Phil, who was still a tanned, sophisticated figure in her eyes, had gaped for a moment. Looking back over the years, she had always wondered if there were not just a touch of fear in his expression.