Midnight Paths: A Collection of Dark Horror

by Joe Hart

  The rock pile started trembling, as if it had been built on a miniature fault line and an earthquake had suddenly begun. Rocks shook loose from their positions, unlocking like pieces of a geometric puzzle. A sound also had begun within the pile. It started as a low humming, like a sewing machine in another room, and slowly rose to a deep, hollow sound. It reminded Joshua of the wind blowing through the large bamboo wind chimes that hung outside his grandfather’s house. Joshua stepped back, an uncertainty rising within him like a meal of bad fish. A question blossomed in his mind: what have I done?

  The light dimmed, the beams withdrawing into the widening gaps like snakes receding into burrows, and there was an abrupt silence. Joshua counted two quick beats of his heart, and then the rock pile flew apart. Joshua cried out at the sudden explosion of rock and fell onto his back in surprise.

  The light rose out of the ruined cairn. It was golden white, and its brilliance made Joshua shield his eyes. He could see that the light didn’t have a definite form; instead, it seemed to wobble like an enormous bubble that was nearly three feet across. It hovered there, and Joshua had the distinct feeling that he was being inspected. He could feel eyes on his skin, and he knew the sounds of his heart and breathing were being absorbed. Slowly he began to scoot away from the light, his butt sliding on the rough dirt and rock with a soft scraping sound.

  The light zipped across the space between it and Joshua, fluid like water. It hit him square in the chest and knocked him flat to the ground. Agony that he had never known existed began to course through his body. It flowed like acid through his veins and tore his muscles apart fiber by fiber. He also felt violated.

  There was something there with him in the pain, something old, so old. It watched him writhe and kick with knowing eyes. It knew pain, it drank it from him like water from a cup. As soon as the pain came to the point where Joshua knew he would die—hoped he would die—it was drained off, and the cycle started over.

  Suddenly the pain was gone, and so was the light. It was as if it all had never happened. Joshua lay on his back staring at the darkening sky and listening to the sound of thunder, which had faded with the pain but now was back, deafening, like the crunching of giant bones. The light had healed him as it guided him through the pain. He could see clearly out of both eyes, and when he rubbed his palm across his face, he felt smooth, undamaged flesh.

  He was about to sit up when images and thoughts that were not entirely his own began to course through his mind like a river of information that was poured into him. He revolted at first, trying to close his mind to what was happening. But it was as if a gate had been opened, and his consciousness began to meld with something else that waited patiently in the darkness of his mind. Then the pain returned.

  Silent Fox pulled his old aching frame up the last few feet of hill and peered over the rise. His long gray hair had been blown free of its leather tie by the wind from the storm, and it tickled his face, but he didn’t notice. His gaze was transfixed on the spectacle several hundred feet before him.

  Joshua lay in a twisting heap on the ground before the crumbled ruins of the ancient cairn, Silent Fox’s prayer book splayed open with the pages down in the dirt next to him. The old man nearly broke into a run, but stopped himself as light began to surround his grandson’s body. Joshua screamed out in pain, a horrible agonizing scream that brought tears to the chief’s eyes. Seeing his grandson like this hit him like a punch to the stomach and nearly took his feet out from under him.

  He noticed that Joshua’s right leg was propped up, his knee jutting toward the low, rumbling sky, but something was wrong. His leg was much too long. The leg stood nearly three feet above the ground, and Joshua’s pants leg was slowly being pulled up his calf. No, not pulled up. The leg was still growing, elongating grotesquely.

  Silent Fox watched in horror and wonder, his mouth hanging agape as he noticed Joshua’s left arm flailing above the young man’s head. It was growing beyond any resemblance of a natural arm.

  Joshua got his right arm under him and began pushing himself into a sitting position, his right leg struggling to break free of the denim that surrounded it. His left arm was now at least five feet long, and the hand attached to the end was the size of a pumpkin. The long, thin fingers flexed and scrabbled in the dirt while Joshua continued to scream and tried to regain his feet. It was like watching someone with only one stilt trying to stand. Joshua rolled onto his left side and supported himself with his freakishly long limb, while his leg bent beneath him and gained an unsteady footing.

  Silent Fox dropped the long wooden box he was holding, his fingers forgetting their purchase as his mind forgot they were gripping it. The noise startled him out of his reverie, and he crouched to open the case. His fingers worked frantically, flinging open the case and pulling the already-strung bow out into the deepening night. He glanced up and immediately wished he hadn’t.

  Joshua was now standing; his left leg hadn’t caught up yet but wasn’t far behind. As it was, the young man stood at an awkward angle, as though he had sprained an ankle. His back had also lengthened, causing the T-shirt he had been wearing to pull tight across a hairless midsection with too many ribs jutting from beneath the pale skin. His neck was longer and barely supported a head that had grown to the size of the big television at their home. Joshua’s features were distorted: his nose had drooped low like a melting candlestick, and his eyes had begun to slide to either side of his enormous head. Folds of thick skin hung down on either side of his mouth, which gaped like the dark maw of a shark. His shrieks had slowly become deep bellows, and now they were coming less often, as though Joshua was beginning to tire inside the distorted form.

  Tears leaked freely from the old man’s eyes, and he realized he was wailing in his people’s tongue, asking the spirits above to spare his grandson. He prayed as he grabbed the flint arrowhead and set it into a blunt arrow shaft. He began to tightly wrap the base of the arrowhead and the notch in the wooden shaft with fine elk gut that he had dried himself. He risked another glance up and recoiled because of how Joshua now looked.

  Joshua’s other leg had caught up, and he stood over twelve feet tall. His arms hung down below his knees and ended in great palms of white skin and long spindly fingers, which flexed and relaxed spasmodically. His face was no longer recognizable as the boy who had ridden here on the motorcycle that sat several yards to his right. The eyes had finished their journey and now sat on either side of the head, devoid of their natural color. There was only blackness beneath the heavy white lids, and Silent Fox was again reminded of a shark. There seemed to be no real nose, but Joshua’s skull had elongated into an enormous guitar shape, the actual head being the body of the instrument and the mouth being the neck. The skin folds the old man had noticed moments earlier had deepened and hung lower from each side of the long maw.

  As Silent Fox watched, the mouth opened and thick mucus-covered teeth shone in a flash of lightning. Then Joshua let out another painful bellow. His cry reminded Silent Fox of the horns that Vikings blew in movies before they went to their bloody deaths in battle. It was deep and shook the old man’s lungs.

  All at once both smoothly muscled legs snapped at the knees and folded backward with audible cracks like small-arms fire. Joshua let out a deep cry of pain and looked down at his broken legs with surprise. Both legs folded back to almost forty-five degrees, and Silent Fox saw the joints in both ankles elongating, the heels sliding upward into new positions several feet above the ground. Joshua’s legs resembled those of an elk or deer, with thick tendons spanning between muscles.

  The beast reared, throwing its impressive wingspan behind it and thrusting its chest toward the black clouds that were now directly overhead, and roared. Silent Fox unconsciously covered his ears with his hands and dropped the arrow to the earth between his feet. The beast’s call—because that’s what it was, he realized—penetrated his old eardrums easily. He stared at not his grandson but the monster of legend, of nightmare, the horr
ible creature that had scared him since he was a child.

  Thunder boomed overhead again as the storm climbed to its climax, and the Pale Man turned its horribly elongated head to the west and sniffed deeply, its breath huffing through pinhole nostrils just above its upper lip. It bared its teeth once again, and a growl rumbled deep inside its chest like a jackhammer in a padded room.

  The Pale Mane took off at an awkward gait, its long arms swinging at its sides as it gained speed. Soon its arms and hands had joined the strange jog, and it began to lope. For a few moments, it looked so strange that Silent Fox thought it would trip and fall, but soon the motion became fluid. As it ran, it resembled a large white ape with the movement of a spider. It didn’t run, it scuttled.

  Silent Fox watched, awestruck and numb with horror, as what used to be his grandson loped over the nearest hill and continued on through the rain toward the valley just outside the long plains.

  “Grab me another beer, will ya?” the man with a short black goatee yelled, laughing.

  The bearded man who was stooped over the small refrigerator to grab a sandwich frowned and shut the fridge door without pulling out one of the many chilled cans. He waited and stared at the man with the goatee until his laughter had died down. Then he replied, “You’re on in two hours, Floyd, you should sober up. You can’t run that machine of yours worth a shit when you’re sober. How the hell are you gonna run it when you’re fucked-up?”

  The long tent grew quiet. The men playing cards and smoking stopped talking and glanced over shoulders and reading glasses at the confrontation brewing before them.

  Floyd blinked blearily a few times before replying. “The fuck did you just say to me?”

  The bearded man moved to the center of the tent before he spoke again. “I said, get your shit together, Floyd, or you’ll get kicked off this job like you did the last one.”

  Thunder rolled overhead, and the lights dimmed and then flared as the generators revved outside in the pounding rain. Floyd stood and lost his balance and had to sit down again. He put his hands on the table, scattering the cards that were sitting face-down before him along with several twenty-dollar bills, and stood shakily while doing a great impression of the leaning tower of Pisa.

  “You’d do well to watch your tongue, Johnny boy!” Floyd half spoke, half yelled at the bearded man. He pointed a wavering finger at the figures before him and willed the two images into one.

  “Go to bed, you shithead, I’ll cover your shift,” Johnny said, turning away and putting his half-eaten sandwich back into the fridge.

  Floyd bellowed a meaningless string of words and rushed at Johnny in a drunken stumble across the uneven dirt floor. Johnny spun and caught the other man in a bear hug that forced Floyd’s air out in a whoosh. Floyd responded by throwing a loose hook at Johnny, which barely connected with his ear. Johnny tightened his grip and began to dig into the other man’s short ribs with his forearm. There were a few yells of exultation from the spectators as the two combatants danced and twirled in a ballet of violence.

  Another sound soon became audible over the cries of the men seated at the poker tables, over the grunts and forced breaths of the two men locked in the fight, and even over the concussion of the overhead thunder. It was a quick vibration that shook the bones of each man. It felt as if a giant were sitting just outside the tent, drumming its fingers on the ground in boredom. The men stopped their yelling in the anticipation of blood, and the two grapplers ceased their twisting to listen as the sound grew louder and louder.

  A giant gray shoulder and head ripped through the side of the tent, followed shortly by the rest of the enormous gangling body as the monster flowed into the men’s eyes and made the synapses in their brains do stutter steps. It shrugged off the torn canvas that clung to its shoulders as it heaved breaths in and out and stared at the men before it with its cold black eyes. The beast then opened its four-foot jaws and screamed while it grabbed with one giant splayed hand the nearest man from his chair. The man screamed but was cut off as the enormous hand clenched, and his intestines squirted out of his mouth and anus like a juice box held too tight.

  The men erupted in a flood of movement. Chairs were overturned and cards flew in the air like pieces of confetti shot from cannons. The Pale Man dropped the ruined body and made a large sweeping motion with its hand, raking a dozen men from the tent and out into the rainstorm as easily as a man knocking over the pieces on a chessboard. The men flew in different directions, many of them with broken bones, while some tumbled into the unforgiving form of an earthmover sitting several yards away from the tent, their flesh tearing and skulls cracking on the hardened steel.

  The remaining men in the tent ran screaming in the opposite direction, not realizing that they had passed the only exit in the middle of the structure. The framework itself shook and threatened to fold as the beast plunged farther into the tent, gnashing its long jaws together and reaching out to grasp the nearest man.

  Its fingers found Floyd, who had tripped and fell in the rush to exit the tent. Floyd screamed with all his might and realized that he was stone sober while both of the enormous hands grasped him like a loaf of bread and pulled in opposite directions. Floyd’s scream rose an octave and was abruptly cut off as long white fingers dug into his midsection and ripped him apart at the waist. Blood flew in a wide swath and sloshed across the dark ground below the creature.

  The remaining men had reached the side of the tent, and they realized their folly as they scrambled at the base of the structure, trying to find the seam between ground and canvas. The monster let out another earsplitting roar and ambled toward them on too-long legs while it balanced itself with even longer arms.

  Two men made a run for the opening just a few yards in front of the creature’s path. The first man ducked and dove for the darkened doorway, landing in the muddy earth that lay beyond. The second man tried to follow but was caught in midair by a hand as wide as a coffin. He was thrown, screaming, through the opposite side of the tent, leaving a gaping hole behind.

  The Pale Man launched itself toward the small exit and shrugged its large shoulders through. It looked as though the tent was giving birth to the white abomination.

  The man who had dived through the door began crawling through the mud, the rain pelting down and soaking the red button-up shirt across his back. He scurried as fast as he could, stumbling and falling along the way, until he reached a tall steel structure, which he crawled beneath and huddled himself into a small shivering ball of muscle and bone.

  The Pale Man stood to its full height and swung an enormous clawed hand at a fuel tank that stood on stilted legs. A thousand gallons of eighty-seven octane tipped and fell heavily to the wet earth, the steel of the tank breaking and spewing forth its contents. Gas fumes welled up like heat rising from the desert floor, and the Pale Man shook its great head to rid itself of the smell. One of its huge feet crushed the stand of a sodium-vapor lamp that had been sitting next to the fueling station. The light fell like a comet toward the earth, and upon impact it sputtered out in an impressive shower of sparks. The sparks lit the gas with a concussive thump, and the northern valley was bathed in a sudden yellow light.

  The tanks better be fucking full. The thought rolled back and forth through Elliot’s mind like driftwood in a high tide. He was tired of waiting in the tent with water beginning to leak under the sides. He didn’t care anymore; he was going to haul the tanks out now. His impatience rose to new heights, and he was through being delayed. He stalked through the mud, his three-hundred-dollar shoes becoming sodden and ruined. He didn’t care, he would buy new shoes. He could buy anything he wanted after this. For Christ’s sake, he was going to buy an island. He had contacted a real estate agent in Bermuda that afternoon and made an offer on a plot of land floating in the great blue-green that was the Atlantic.

  He wished he was there now, not in this wet stinking hole of the Southwest. He could see the tanks looming in the slanted rain of the storm, standing
like giant monoliths amid shimmering silver curtains. Almost there. Almost there.

  “Larry!” Elliot yelled the man’s name in irritation and slight desperation. The rain pelted him endlessly, his coat and shirt beneath seeming like separate skins that were becoming one. “Larry!” His cry died as quickly as it had emerged from his throat.

  In the gloom of the storm, he spied a dark shape moving in his direction around one side of the huge canisters. He let out a small sigh of relief as it began to make its way toward him, one step after another, very deliberate.

  It was the way that the figure walked that began to disturb him. It approached with calmness and surety that, Elliot realized too late, Larry did not possess.

  Jones strode the last few steps like a man on a Sunday walk in the park, the rain hammering down upon him and the lightning flashing behind him. He stopped and stared at Elliot through the pouring drops of water.

  “Clever guy you are, boss,” Jones said. A burst of lightning and clap of thunder flowed together while light and sound became one. Jones’s face became a skull in the strobe of the weather, his teeth gaping obscenely through a torn maw that grinned, flickering away into darkness.

  “What’re you talking about?” Elliot asked, as lightly as he could while yelling against the wind that raged around them.

  “Lithium, boss! Where the real money is! It’s like beef! It’s what’s for dinner! I didn’t think old Larry was going to talk for a while, but he turned out to be an all-right guy.”

  Elliot stood like a stone in the sinking mud, the rain pouring down endlessly. He realized his right-hand man, his bodyguard, his enforcer, was insane. Elliot had suspected it at certain points in their relationship. The idea had been like a moth dancing in the darkness just outside a porch light’s glow. Now there was no denying it. The gleam in the man’s eyes that stood before him couldn’t be denied anymore.