Midnight Paths: A Collection of Dark Horror

by Joe Hart

  Elliot’s jaw hung open like a forgotten window, and any attempt at making a sound was abandoned. He still held the pistol out in front of him like a chrome talisman in the pounding rain. The creature swiveled smoothly, as if on bearings, toward where Elliot stood like a shivering statue. It snarled again and stalked quickly across the open ground between them.

  Elliot finally snapped from his reverie of horror and began pulling the trigger of the small pistol. He didn’t squeeze and breath like his instructor had taught him; he pulled the trigger as fast as he could. One shot out of seven hit its mark, striking the Pale Man high on its long forehead. The bullet tore the white skin open in a puff of water and blood. The wound drizzled what looked like strawberry syrup on a sundae until the skin suddenly weaved back together, thin strands of white flesh interconnecting and meshing. Eventually there was no mark where the bullet had landed.

  The gun clicked empty, and the slide locked back without another shell to breach. Elliot continued to squeeze the unmoving trigger until he finally realized the gun was empty. The Pale Man didn’t falter as it strode toward him, and Elliot felt warmth near his crotch as his bladder released. Without any more hesitation, Elliot spun and dove under the large trailer as a huge white hand swept across the spot he had just been standing in.

  He hit his knees and scrambled under the large support rails of the trailer’s undercarriage. His mind slipped back to playing hide-and-seek as a child in a Las Vegas suburb, sliding beneath his father’s truck, the dusty ground puffing up in a cloud around his face.

  Elliot pulled his feet in tight as he rolled onto the other side of the trailer and stayed low, waiting for a giant hand attached to a grotesquely long arm to come slithering after him through the darkness. He listened and could only hear the patter of the rain on the soaked ground around him.

  Thunder rolled overhead, and he glanced to his right. His eyes found the passenger-side door of the large truck. Although it was only thirty feet from him, it seemed a football field away. He could see it playing out in his mind already: he would run toward the door, glancing behind him as he went; the door would loom before him, salvation glinting off its deep satin blue in the lightning; and just as he was reaching for the gleaming door handle, a hand would reach from the front of the truck and crush him. He could feel its cold fingers gouging into his sides, breaking his ribs like chicken bones.

  For a moment he wondered what the creature was—because it was no bear—and where it had come from. Hell, he supposed. Where else could something like that be born? Nowhere in the real world, that was for sure. There wasn’t any room for something like that in his reality.

  Elliot glanced quickly under the long trailer and then toward the side of the truck. Still no movement. If he was going to go, it had to be now. He nodded unconsciously and stood up. He realized as he squeezed his hands into tight fists that he had dropped his gun somewhere under the trailer while scrambling away from the monster. It didn’t matter, that thing didn’t mind bullets any more than it minded the rain.

  Elliot stepped cautiously and tried to listen over the storm for a telltale sign of the creature. When nothing reached out to grab him, he began to walk quicker. Five steps, eight steps, ten. The door was only a few feet away now. He could drive this fucking thing, he knew it deep in his bones. He would be able to drive it, or he’d learn real fast. His hand touched the door handle, and a small warm pouch of relief bloomed in his stomach.

  A squeal filled his ears, and he wondered who could be killing a pig nearby in a rainstorm like this. When he turned, his eyes bulged at what he saw. The trailer was being tipped slowly onto its side. The huge steel tanks filled with lithium water were sliding to the side as though they weren’t on a solid trailer but on the deck of a ship in a gale miles out at sea. They listed dangerously as the trailer kept moving upward onto its side.

  That’s too much weight, Elliot thought as his hand tightened on the door handle. He was just about to pull the door open and attempt his getaway, regardless of what was happening to the trailer, when the second tank from the front tipped dangerously on its bottom edge, balanced there for a moment, and then flipped off the trailer onto its round side. It hit a rock the size of a man’s head when it landed on the rough ground and began revolving toward the front of the truck like a giant rolling pin.

  Elliot let a small shriek escape his mouth as he tried to dive out of the path of the oncoming tank. His expensive shoes slid in the soft mud, and he fell a few feet from where he had jumped, his hands digging into the soil as he landed on his stomach.

  The tank rolled over both his legs just above the knees. He heard the sound of his kneecaps snapping and sliding to the sides of his legs, the noise like popping walnut shells. Both feet tried folding down to the ground, but they snapped loose of their ankle joints and were crushed into bloody pulps of bone and skin.

  Elliot let loose a scream as this happened that was like no shriek before. It was wholehearted, and he had found his octave and made it his own. The air wailed out of his lungs as the agony built and built to the point where he began to think, to hope, to dream, that he would pass out.

  Then he felt them: fingers. Sliding around his stomach in the mud. He prayed one of them would pierce his side and gouge his heart and make the awful pain from his legs stop.

  But none did. They lifted him gently. They turned him upright, his crushed and useless legs dangling like those of a ventriloquist’s dummy below him. Elliot blinked the rain and mud from his eyes and gazed into the face of the beast. It regarded him with its shark stare, its eyes unwavering. Water dripped from its enormous muzzle, and hot, reeking breath blazed from the two nostrils above its upper lip. Elliot strained his arms against the iron grip the creature had around his midsection, but there was no use, no escape this time. The end of the line had come, and it was time to get off.

  “Do it!” he screamed at the white impassive face that scrutinized him from a few inches away. “What are you waiting for?”

  The Pale Man slowly nodded, and suddenly there was warmth in the cold fingers surrounding his torso. The heat spread up through Elliot’s body until it reached his head. Images and sounds bloomed in his mind. The time he had kicked his new puppy that his mother had bought him for his tenth birthday. The time he had stolen five hundred dollars from his father’s wallet and gotten their maid fired in turn. The time he had raped a college girl in a small bathroom stall. The time he had paid Jones ten thousand dollars to kill a man who had told him that he would expose Elliot’s affair with the wife of Emerson’s CEO. All of the worst moments in his life were brought under close scrutiny, magnified somehow before being ripped away into the rain drenched night.

  “Fuck you,” Elliot said through bloodstained teeth.

  The Pale Man opened his mouth in huge yawn and shoved Elliot in headfirst. Its jaws came down in a final snap that severed Elliot’s arms and legs in clean cuts, which fell away unheeded to the ground. The Pale Man chewed in short crunches as Elliot’s scream filtered out between bites and then abruptly stopped. One white hand scooped up the severed arms and legs off the ground like hors d’oeuvres and popped them into the gaping maw. It chewed for some time as it stood in the rain near the abandoned truck. Finally, it swallowed and gazed around at its surroundings. It could hear something in the distance, below the rumble of thunder. A high, shrill whining. It turned on its muscular legs, took one step, and stopped when it saw the figure standing in the rain at the rear of the trailer.

  Silent Fox’s long hair, so neatly braided and combed hours before, was soaked, a full sheet of gray that stretched nearly to his lower back. His colorless eyes stared unblinking at the creature that stood on the blood-soaked ground at the opposite end of the trailer.

  The Pale Man took half a step and paused, studying the old man. There was no fear in the air. The age-old smell that hung about all of its prey was absent.

  “I will not fear my own blood, but instead give it back to the earth whence it came. My
fathers before me hold us close.” Silent Fox’s words carried across the air that separated the man and beast.

  The Pale Man’s lips pulled back, and it roared its bass call and lumbered at the old man, rain pelting off its white flesh as it ran.

  Silent Fox stood still, rooted to the ground as if he had grown there and seen decades pass. The long white arms began to reach for its prey, and its mouth hinged open … wide … wider still, until Silent Fox thought it could go no farther. A sudden lightning strike illuminated the beast’s face, and the old man sprang into action.

  The ancient recurve bow swung up and around from behind Silent Fox’s back, the long arrow already nocked on the string. The old man’s eyes fought to sight down the arrow’s shaft as he drew back the taut string with all his might. He could see the flint arrowhead, razor-sharp edges glinting and bound tightly by the elk gut on the end. The beast roared once more as it overtook the old man, and the string sprang from his fingers.

  “Love you, Joshua,” Silent Fox said.

  The arrow flew from the bow and whistled down the open throat of the Pale Man. The flint buried itself deep into the thick muscle of the creature’s heart. The organ nearly exploded with the impact, but the Pale Man’s momentum took it forward and it collided with the old man. It fell heavily on top of Silent Fox, and the two lay motionless in the rain.

  After several moments light began to emanate from the pale-white body, and the skin began to dissolve as though it was being burned from the inside. Golden hues mixed with brilliant blues illuminated the side of the long trailer. The light filtered upward like embers from a forgotten fire. They continued to rise, not extinguished by the rain. Higher and higher into the sky the flashes of light rose, until there was nothing left of the monster’s corpse. Instead, the body of a young man lay where it had been. The old man’s body lay next to it, his eyes held tightly shut to the rain that continued to fall. Joshua’s hand was stretched out above his head as if he was reaching for something. The old man’s hand was extended down, and the very ends of their fingers were just barely touching.

  In the distance the sirens of rescue vehicles echoed off the valley’s walls as they drew nearer to the drill site. After a short while, the rain began to let up. As the sun climbed from its bed in the east to warm the horizon with the red light of morning, the rain tapered off more, and then stopped.

  THE MAN IN THE ROOM

  There was a man in the room. He stood at the foot of the large bed, white patches of moonlight shining through the curtainless window and dappling his legs. He looks so out of place there, Henry thought, and he blinked again. The contrast of the shadow figure in the tidy, almost-empty bedroom scared him even more than realizing there was a man standing at the foot of his bed in the dead of night.

  Henry’s breath hissed involuntarily, and his question became a jumble of vowels that tripped off his sleep-encased tongue.

  “What’s that?” the man whispered from the darkness.

  Henry couldn’t see his face, but he could see the shadows move around the area where his mouth was. “What do you want?” Henry repeated, this time more clearly.

  The man stepped slightly closer to the bed in an easy, almost-lazy way. Henry reached out automatically to his right side and felt for Diane, but his fingers met only smooth cotton and her pillow. He pulled his hand back as if he had touched a hot burner and remembered that she’d been gone over two years now.

  “What do I want?” the shadow said, standing near the foot of Henry’s bed like a man at dinner buffet. “I want the true shape of things. I want to know. To know is power. I want that.”

  The voice rasped out of a dry throat, and Henry resisted the urge to clear his own. The voice was like sandpaper to his ears.

  “What do you want with me?” Henry asked, his voice gaining a little strength with the indignation of his home being invaded.

  “Oh, you’re my truth. Don’t you know me? I’m the one you dream about.”

  Henry’s mind spun as the sleep and confusion slowly cleared from his head like morning fog burned off by the sun. He knew the voice coming from the man’s mouth, but something was wrong. Something was so wrong that he couldn’t grasp it.

  “I … I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said, trying to think if there was a weapon somewhere near his bed that he could grab. The nearest object was a large bedside lamp that sat on a table to his left. It couldn’t be swung easily, but at the very least he could shed some light on the man so he could see who he was.

  “Sure you do, my friend. I’ve come all this way to say hello. I know you need me, so I’m never far away. I’m the truth.”

  “The truth of what?” Henry asked, as he made ready to dive toward the light switch.

  “The truth of you,” the voice croaked.

  Henry lunged, and as his fingers grazed the depressible light switch, another connection was made deep in his mind. He knew the face he would see when the light flared within the hundred-watt bulb, even though it was impossible. Even as he turned the light on and the optic signals were sent to his mind and interpreted into conceivable thought, his brain rebelled against it. A scream left Henry’s mouth like bats escaping a cave at twilight.

  Daniel Ash stood at the foot of his bed, naked, all six foot three of him, his dark eyes partially hidden by the slash of black hair hanging lankly over his broad forehead. His thick lips wore a small knowing smile, and Henry could see the three scars on his flush cheek where Diane had clawed him while he strangled her.

  “You’re dead!” Henry screamed after drawing a heaving breath back into his shaking lungs. “You can’t be here, I saw them kill you!”

  Ash did not move. He only stared at the shivering middle-aged man sitting in the bed before him. When Henry’s breathing slowed after a few moments, Ash spoke.

  “She was the first, but not the last. I watched the light fade from her eyes. I know her; there was truth there.”

  “Shut up! Shut up, you fuck! You killed my wife! You’re dead! They killed you in the gas chamber! They killed you!” Henry rose from the bed. His feet touched the room’s cold wood floor and seemed to sink into it.

  “They set me free, my friend. Free to come here and be with you, whenever I want. To learn the truth and to teach it to you.”

  “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you this time,” Henry growled, and was surprised by the venom in his voice. He had always been a gentle person, and the hatred that dripped from his words—unclothed as the man before him—did not seem his own. Henry took another step on the soft, springy wood floor, but stopped as something moved in the darkness between Ash’s parted lips.

  A black multi-jointed leg jutted from the other man’s mouth like a thin cigarette. It held the illusion of a cigarette until it twitched and pulled against Ash’s upper lip. The spider emerged slowly from its burrow, expanding its other legs as it gained freedom and began crawling across the man’s face. Henry staggered back, a cry of revulsion choking off the words of rage that had earlier poured forth so easily. Another spider joined the first and crawled up to the dark nest of hair. Soon Ash’s face was covered by the creatures, and his mouth hung open to accommodate their departure from the depths of his body.

  Henry backed away and fell onto the top of his nightstand. His hands grasped the lamp on the table as he steadied himself, and without thinking, he stood and hurled the large light across the room at the naked infestation.

  The light connected solidly with Ash’s head, and it was as if a grenade had gone off inside the man’s body. His skin flew apart and his mouth opened as his body dropped away like a coat from a hanger.

  Thousands of spiders of all sizes and colors flowed to the floor in a living pool of undulating legs and fat bodies. They spread out like a drop of honey on a plate and began to flow toward Henry’s exposed feet. As the bedside lamp finally landed on the floor, the light winked out and the spiders became dark scurrying shapes on the hardwood before him. Henry tilted his head back and
screamed when the many legs started making their way over his feet, climbing toward his open mouth.

  The scream echoed hollowly down the bright corridor, bouncing off the white and pale-green squares of linoleum. The nurse dressed in white scrubs sitting at the small table tucked into an alcove near the far end of the hall looked up from the book he was reading.

  Nineteen, he thought. Had to be. Always was. There hadn’t been a single night when he had been on shift here that nineteen hadn’t woken screaming. It was almost like clockwork.

  With a sigh he stood and stretched his back and felt the solid cracks of his spine adjusting. Without pausing he drew a ring from his belt and selected a small silver key from the multitude hanging there. The key slid into a lock on the steel cabinet near the desk, and his hand darted inside. It withdrew, clutching a plastic-wrapped syringe and a small bottle of clear liquid.

  Nineteen was a Statie. Staties get a shot if they get out of hand, especially at night with only one nurse on each floor to care for them. Staties didn’t have family or friends that looked after them and made sure they were all right.

  After the syringe was full of the clear liquid, the nurse made his way down the long hallway, listening to the squeak of his shoes on the clean floor punctuated every few seconds by a hoarse scream that filtered out of the end room.

  When he reached the steel door marked “19,” the nurse pulled his keys out and fit the largest of the group into the lock. As the door swung into the padded room, the screams from the man strapped to the large bed amplified a hundred times. The nurse quickly stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He couldn’t have this crazy waking the others, or else he’d have a hell of a night ahead of him.