Midnight Paths: A Collection of Dark Horror

by Joe Hart

When he reached the top of the first hill he came to, he nearly stopped and stared but continued to run in spite of himself. On the other side of the rise the clay dissipated and a cornfield stretched out before him like an expansive brown sea. The rows started only a few feet from the top of the hill, and as David ran into them, he knew he would find a way out.

  The rows continued in straight lines, and the long leaves of the stalks brushed his arms and bruised sides as he sprinted down them. As he ran, he could hear the creature behind him. He couldn’t hear its breath—he doubted it breathed at all—but he could hear the leaves whisper over its body as it quickly passed by them.

  After running several hundred yards through the corn, a new memory suddenly materialized in David’s mind. He was still driving down the road past the corn. The rain still pounded onto the windshield. There was some movement off to the right of the road. Something was coming out of the corn. It was coming fast—too fast. He began to hit the brakes as it ran out of the ditch and onto the road.

  David snapped back to reality as he saw a break in the rows ahead of him. A gap widened as he neared it, and then there was no denying what he was seeing. The corn was ending in a ditch. He could make out some grass and mud, and the best thing was he could see the wet shine of pavement above the depression. He had found a road. A real road, by God! He had never dreamed that he would be so happy to see a simple road. He quickened his pace again as he heard the sound of an approaching car, its wheels making the unmistakable hissing sound of rubber cutting through water.

  David burst out of the corn and ran up the side of the ditch as the approaching car’s headlights fell on him. He couldn’t let it pass because the thing behind him would catch him, and he knew it would kill him. Deep down in his soul, he knew it would eat him. It would eat him alive on the side of this highway, without anyone around to help him or merely to hear his last screams.

  As he ran up the shoulder of the highway, he began to wave his arms back and forth to stop the passing motorist. At the same time, a rock slid under his right foot, and he began to fall onto the highway. His arms came out instinctively to save his face from hitting first, and then all the sound in the world became screaming rubber on blacktop.

  David Hanson drove through the rain in his rented vehicle. The cornstalks waved at him eerily in the wind along the sides of the road.

  Jesus, he thought to himself, why did they have to have the biggest chiropractic conference in the nation in southern Minnesota? He shook his head slightly and looked at the dashboard. Half a tank of gas. He would have to stop at the next town. He rubbed his forehead, trying to wipe away the fatigue. If there is a next town, he thought gloomily.

  All of a sudden, his vision caught movement off to the right side of the highway. Something was moving near the corn. No, now it was in the ditch. His eyes tried to discern and focus on what he was seeing. A deer? No, it was on two legs. It was a man. David’s foot came off of the gas and began applying pressure to the brake.

  When he realized the man wasn’t stopping at the side of the highway, he began to press on the brake pedal with some force. The tires beneath the rental began to protest and shriek against the wet asphalt. The man waved his hands over his head in a sign of urgency, and then was falling. Falling into the lane where David’s car was. He pushed on the brake so hard he thought it would snap off under the force of his foot. Although, he knew it wasn’t enough.

  “Fuck!” he yelled, as the sickening thump that he knew he would hear came. The car skidded to a stop on the highway, and David immediately threw the lever into park.

  “Oh Jesus, oh God, I fucking hit someone!” David threw open his door and stepped out onto the rain-slick highway. “Oh no, oh no, oh no!” he said over and over, as he ran to the motionless figure that lay on the white line near the right edge of the road.

  It was a man in dirty clothes. One shoe had come off from the impact, and David could see a sock that had once been white but was now stained a dark gray. He could also see the gaping wound in the man’s head where the car’s bumper had hit him. David knelt over the man for a few moments in the rain, watching for signs of life. A breath, a twitch of an arm or leg, any incoherent words.

  There was nothing. He was dead.

  David began to cry. He reached out to touch the man’s shoulder. His skin was still warm through the wet torn fabric of his shirt. After a moment of indecision, David rolled the dead man over onto his back, and stared into his own face.

  Just as his optic nerves sent the image of his own lifeless features to his brain, pain exploded like a starburst in the back of his skull. His head rocked toward the corpse that lay in front of him, and then his body went slack as darkness flooded his mind. He fell to the ground.

  The black creature stood over the two men, one unconscious and the other dead. It looked back and forth between the two for a few moments, and then it stepped forward and grasped each of them around the waist. It easily lifted the bodies onto its massive shoulders. It turned and walked off the highway and down the ditch, disappearing into the rows of whispering cornstalks.

  YOU SURE ARE CALM, COWBOY

  The late-afternoon sun blazed across the small desert town, long shadows forming in the dusty and narrow road that ran between the dilapidated buildings. The storefronts, which had so much character and promise years before, were now faded and in disrepair because the people that had built them had moved on some time ago. A tumbleweed danced over a few broken brown bottles before tearing across the street, only to get tangled in the remains of a horse trough.

  When the tumbleweed stopped, nothing else moved. The wind that had carried it into the small town suddenly vanished, as if realizing where it was and quickly relocated elsewhere. All was quiet until a harsh scream filled the air, which was cut off as quickly as it had begun. There were no other sounds to fill the void that was left hanging on the dead air like a cloying spider web.

  A rumble began to build in the east, as though a distant thundercloud were approaching. The rolling grumble shook small particles of dust and sand off some of the nearby porches. The rumbling slowly built until the source became clear when it rounded the deserted barbershop at the end of the street.

  A group of five horses entered the street and thundered up the road, throwing dust and gravel into the air. Each horse carried a man who leaned into the saddle to avoid the dust that was kicked up in front of him. The men wore long dusters, despite the day’s heat, along with black hats pulled down tight over their foreheads. A bandanna covered each man’s nose and mouth, a skull and crossbones adorning the front of the fabric.

  The men rode at full speed up the street until the leader of the group reined in his horse, abruptly pulling the steed to a stop beneath a sign that read “Black Cat Saloon.” Each successive rider did the same, and all the men hastily jumped down from their mounts, drawing long revolvers from their holsters.

  Jasper Hull, who had jumped down first, looked quickly at the other four men before speaking. “’Kay, boys, ya know the drill. Shoot the first maggot that gives ya lip, the rest’ll piss themselves gettin’ the cash. Let’s go!”

  The five men mounted the steps as Jasper kicked the double swinging doors in, knocking them off their hinges with a single thrust of his boot.

  The inside of the saloon was dimly lit by a few kerosene lanterns hanging from various points on the rafters. The late-afternoon sun along with the dust from the street had shrunk the men’s pupils tight. Jasper immediately turned his six-shooter at the dark shape that stood behind the bar near his left, and his four companions aimed their weapons in various directions and began yelling orders and obscenities.

  Jasper saw the outline of the bartender slowly raise its hands to shoulder height. “Good boy, barkeep. Those hands stay up an’ you do what I say, you’ll keep your guts where they are and not sprayed on the wall behind ya.”

  The room was beginning to come into focus for the five men. They could see that the area was rectangular and near
ly forty feet across, with round tables set adjacent to one another. At the far end of the room was a stairway that undoubtedly led up to the whores’ rooms for rent. There were several people sitting around some of the tables, and most were staring at them with slight interest, still holding their drinks.

  Two or three of the patrons appeared to be sleeping or passed out as they leaned back in their chairs. A whore dressed in a light blue skirt was pressed up against the far wall near the stairway, her hands splayed out next to her against the wood. She seemed to be trying to fade into the fibers of the wall and disappear.

  A lone man sat at the end of the bar farthest from the gang, near the back door. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that hid his features and left a dark hole where his face should be. His faded duster hung nearly to the floor around the barstool on which he sat, with cuts and tears crisscrossing the leather every foot or so. The man stared straight ahead from under his hat, seemingly looking at the wall behind the bar. Every few seconds he would raise a dark glass and drink several swallows of the contents with rough slurping sounds, then set it back down on the burnished wood.

  Jasper took all of this in before he resumed looking at the bartender, who was still frozen with his hands at his shoulders.

  “Mike, Lyle, you boys hustle them people over yonder at them tables. See if they have valuables that they’re willin’ to part with.”

  Several of the armed men snickered at his comment, yellowed and snus-stained teeth showing through bearded mouths as they laughed.

  “Dillon, Marty, you boys check the upstairs and make sure the sheriff ain’t getting his jollies off with one of the local whores. We don’t want any surprises.”

  “Sir, I’d be happy to get you the cash from the till if you see fit,” the barman said in a light voice.

  “Boy, you’ll shut up and do what you’re told right now, or I’ll loose a world of hurt on you,” Jasper replied quickly, as he shoved the barrel of the Colt revolver farther across the nicked and rutted bar.

  At that moment Jasper noticed something strange. The barman’s eyes were wide with fear, but that was nothing new. He had seen the same look in dozens of eyes over the last year as his gang had made their rounds through the half-settled, mostly lawless state. The thing that didn’t sit right was the way the barkeep kept swinging his eyes over to the left. He would look at Jasper, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, and then quickly shift his gaze toward the end of the bar. He did this over and over, like his eyes were doing some sort of strange dance routine. Bulge, swing, slide back, bulge.

  “Oh, fuck me sonofabitch goddammit!” Mike yelled.

  Jasper swung his attention away from the bartender, expecting to see half a dozen armed lawmen coming through the back door. But he spied only Mike and Lyle slowly backing up toward the front entrance. Lyle’s attention was so drawn to the people at the tables that he tripped over an overturned chair and fell hard on his ass. Dillon and Marty stopped their progress up the stairway and turned back to see what the commotion was about.

  “The fuck … the fuck is going on here?” Mike said between breaths, as he backed up to Jasper and almost bumped into the bigger man.

  “What are you goin’ on about?” Jasper said irritably. He didn’t want to waste any more time than he had to in this shit heap of a town.

  “They’re all dead, Jasper, they’re all fucking dead!” Mike said, as he turned to the other man and grasped his shirt.

  “Get offa me, you loon!” Jasper said, pushing the other man away harshly. “Whaddya mean ‘they’re all dead’?”

  “The people at the tables! See fer yerself!” Mike said. He pointed a shaking hand at the round tables in the center of the room.

  Jasper stepped swiftly past the frightened man toward the tables, shoving Lyle out of the way as he went. Before he took two steps, he swung around and pointed at the bartender.

  “No funny shit, barkeep! Dillon, keep an eye on him,” Jasper said. He turned back to inspect the tables and their occupants.

  When he got within three feet of the first table, he could smell the blood, a thick coppery tang that filled his nostrils and nearly made him gag. His eyes adjusted more near the middle of the dark room, and he saw that Mike had been right.

  Corpses sat at every table in the room. The people he had thought were sleeping or passed out leaned back at awkward angles. Most of them were missing much of their throats. He could see the ropy cords of muscles and tendons that were exposed in the necks of the nearest victims. Blood freely ran down some of their clothing and was soaking into their pants and skirts.

  Jasper stepped around several of the tables and inspected the people who seemed to stare at the front door. Most of these people had circular holes the size of half dollars punched into the backs of their necks and skulls, as if they had been shot with a large-caliber gun at very close range. The only problem was he couldn’t make out any exit wounds. All of the patrons with these injuries were entirely whole otherwise.

  When he bent down to examine one hole in what looked to be the remains of the general store owner’s head, he realized that he could look straight out through the man’s mouth and nose. The inside of his head had been hollowed out like a jack-o’-lantern.

  Jasper stood up quickly and drew in a sharp breath. “What the fuck is going on here?” he mumbled.

  He took a step to his right to move around the nearest table, and his boot slipped on something wet and pliable on the floor. He knelt down and came face-to-face with the town’s sheriff. The man had been torn in two. Strips of flesh and ropes of entrails descended from the man’s upper half and ran a few feet to a spot under Jasper’s boot.

  “Christ!” Jasper yelled.

  He backpedaled until he bumped into Mike, who uttered a short yelp that would have sounded more at home coming from a young child than a 215-pound man. Jasper spun and shoved his pistol across the bar at the bartender, who flinched but never took a step back.

  “All right, the fuck is goin’ on here?” Jasper yelled at the man, spittle flinging from his lips.

  The bartender again turned his eyes down the bar, and this time Jasper followed them.

  The man at the end of the bar still sat where he had been sitting when they entered. He finished the last of his drink with a few wet sucking noises and set the glass down on the bar with a thump.

  Jasper cocked his pistol and began stepping cautiously toward the man, who neither moved nor registered that anyone else was in the room.

  “You sure are calm, cowboy,” Jasper said with a shaky voice that was very unlike his usual sure-and-twangy accent. The normally always-steady barrel of the Colt began to waver back and forth, up and down.

  “You responsible for this, boy?” Jasper asked, as he took another step toward the man.

  “You hear me, cowboy?” he asked, stopping ten feet short of the man on the stool. Jasper looked the man over for a moment, something sticking in his mind like a splinter.

  Suddenly he realized what was wrong. The man had no legs or feet. There were no boots or legs protruding from the duster, only empty air beneath the man’s coat. Wind hissed in through Jasper’s broken, crooked teeth, and he stepped back, aimed the pistol, and squeezed the trigger.

  At that moment the man on the stool turned and slipped off his perch to land on the floor with a thump, the coat and hat falling away from him like leaves from a tree.

  It was not a man at all under the hat and coat. The abomination stretched to its full height of seven feet as Jasper and the rest of the men gasped and backed away in horror. The creature seemed to be a mixture of a scorpion and what once might have been a man. It stood on four many-segmented legs that ended in clawed tips, which bit into the rough wooden floorboards. Its torso was a burnt brownish orange and layered like a pill bug’s stomach. The arms that extended from the body were long and spiny and ended in three thick, hooked digits that twisted and flicked in the air as if they were tasting it. A slim tail slowly uncoiled and revealed its end, which was
adorned with a bone-white spike nearly a foot long. The creature’s broad neck extended more than two feet and ended in a misshapen head that was elongated, stretching the features that once may have been human. The eyes were yellowish brown and much too large for its face. A mouth that once may have held straight white teeth now played host to two dark mandibles, which extended from between the thick lips along with a round tongue. The tongue looked to be muscle that transitioned into bone. The end of the tongue was serrated with sharp spines, and as Jasper gazed upon it, he knew what had made the holes in the unfortunate patrons’ necks and heads.

  The thing’s eyes shifted from Jasper to the men behind him and back again, its horrible gaze taking in the panic and terror on the men’s faces. Then it began to laugh. It started as a chuckle, then grew into the belly laughs of a man who had seen something genuinely funny.

  The laughter was what finally snapped Jasper out of his trance. He pulled the trigger of his .45 Colt revolver and sent a chunk of lead flying at the thing’s head.

  The creature skittered out of the shot’s way at an amazing speed, the movements definitely insect-like. With quick, jerky motions, it moved behind one of the tables, where it stopped and hunkered low.

  The rest of the men followed Jasper’s lead and began firing as fast as their six-shooters would allow. Splinters flew up from the top of the table, and several chairs snapped in half with the impacts of the shots. After a few seconds the firing slowed, then stopped as each man ran out of ammo.

  “The fuck was that thing?” Mike whispered through clenched teeth. His gun hand still flexed, squeezing the handle of his pistol.

  In a blaze of wood and debris, the thing hurled itself from behind the overturned table. It grabbed a lone chair that was lying off to one side, and as it hurtled through the dusty air, it flung the chair at Marty, who was the nearest to it.

  The chair struck Marty full in the chest and shattered into pieces. The impact threw Marty off his feet, and when he landed and slid up to the bar, his gun skittered away from his outstretched hand. Marty tried to take in a breath but was surprised to hear loud sucking sounds below his chin. As he looked down at the jagged pieces of the chair sticking out of his chest, his vision began to dim, then slowly went black.