Return to Darkness

by Laimo, Michael

  I peer through the connecting door into my bedroom (I find it odd calling it my bedroom; what was once a sanctuary of safety has become a slaughterhouse of horror which I no longer sleep in) and see the medical pouch on the floor. Inside may be the supplies I need to stitch the wound back up, but I’ve used up all the meds in it, even the Tylenol.

  A jolt of pain hits me and I double over, feeling now a bulge in my pocket. I dig my hand into it and pull out two pill bottles, one halfway filled with morphine, the other with methadone.

  For a moment I wonder where they came from, how they got there, but then remember I put them there myself, lifted from my own supplies in the den of the Isolates. I shake the bottles. Yes…these will work wonders on my pain. My infection, however, is another story. All I’ve got is penicillin, which seems not to be working…yet. But the relief of pain the morphine will bring will give me the strength to get back downstairs into my office for the antibiotic, and perhaps allow me to find a way to get someone from the Washburn family to make a sacrifice upon the center stone.

  In my mind’s eye, my daughter’s dirty face in the den of the Isolates speaks to me: Daddy, I’m scared. Help me Daddy...

  With this, I must persevere.

  I pop two morphine pills, then spend the next hour scraping pus and dirt from my wound with a clean cloth, enduring the pain as though I were having an organ eviscerated. At one point I check my reflection in the mirror and see an emaciated holocaust survivor staring back at me, cheeks sunken and yellow, eyes bloodshot and rheumy, a week's worth of scruff trying unsuccessfully to hide it all. Half the hairs in my head have surrendered their pigment, now a lighter shade of gray. The variety of cuts and scrapes have scabbed over, only the one on my forehead still thick and wet.

  Having cleaned out my stomach wound as well as I can, I cap it with a clean cloth, then change into a clean pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and head downstairs. The morphine has taken a strong hold of my mind and body, and suddenly I feel giddy and lightheaded and somewhat uncaring of my condition. Once in the kitchen, I drink a glass of water…giggling to myself as it splashes down my throat. It feels good, invigorating. Shit, with the pain gone and the high fever under control, I feel like a new man. Yeah.

  I drink as much water as my body will allow, washing down the rest of the stale crackers I’ve got left. It occurs to me now that I’ve got perhaps three or four days worth of food left in the house, a few loaves of bread past the "sell by", some canned goods, a jar of peanut butter. But that’s it. It’s not like I’m eating much anyway, but it tells me that I’ve got only so much time to rescue my daughter, maybe Christine (my CRUMBLING mind is beginning to give up on the prospect of seeing my wife again), and get the hell out of Ashborough.

  That is, Michael, if they let you go. We’ve been through this all before.

  Indeed, we have.

  I head back into the examining room. It’s still riddled with filth and blood and leaves; did I expect otherwise? I remove the cloth from my wound. It’s stained with a variety of sickly hues, brown, yellow, red, black. Nasty. I douse it with Iodine, flinching from the sting, then place it right back over the wound. For a moment I actually consider stitching it back up, but that would require a lot of time, and I’m not in the condition to perform any level of surgery right now. The old stitches would have to be removed, what remains of them, and fresh bleeding would occur. There’d be more pain and more of a mess. It wouldn’t be worth it, now that it has—for the most part—stopped bleeding. Sure, I’ll eventually have a nasty scar to contend with, but I should be so lucky to live long enough to deal with an eyesore of a scar someday.

  In a few minutes the wound is taped up, covered from the elements.

  Now what to do about the infection? I take my temperature with an electronic ear thermometer. 101.5. And that’s with the morphine racing through my bloodstream. I dig through all the drawers in my office, find some samples of amoxicillin along with some more penicillin, and take them all with a cup of water…and then on a whim, a chaser of bourbon. Doesn’t matter right now anyway. The morphine, something I’ve never had the pleasure of taking in the past, is working wonders on my pain, and on my outlook. No wonder people get addicted to this stuff. Should’ve started taking it months ago.

  I take the next few moments to gaze about my office and the disaster it has become. Everything is everywhere, and there are still remnants of my dream smeared on the floor. I walk over it all—the blood, the hair, the Isolate footprints—to the floor-to-ceiling windows, and peer outside. The skies are hard and gray, thick with swollen clouds about to burst with snow. The trees stand lifelessly in the distance, their branches reaching out to one another like fingertips in a da Vinci painting. Christine’s herb garden, once a source for Isolate tea (made to feed her unborn child), remains an untended shadow of its former self, dead beneath the barren cold.

  The morphine continues to dull my senses, cushioning them with an awareness I’ve never felt before. I feel little pain, both emotionally and physically, and despite knowing my daughter is still out there waiting for me to rescue her from her demonic captors, I feel no immediate sense of urgency. Perhaps my "high" has made me see things from a more realistic perspective—that I have to take things one step at a time, and with no haste.

  Do what Phillip once did to you.

  Maltor…maltor…maltor…

  I nod to myself, and no sooner does the realization of what I must do next (setting a trap for some small woodland creature comes to mind, another rabbit, an opossum, or a squirrel), that something darts across the yard, right at the window.

  I backpedal away from the window, arms pinwheeling for the sense of balance the drugs in my system have sucked away. My rear smacks into my desk and I topple sideways onto the floor. A hammerstrike of pain leaps from my wound, and I cry out forcefully, sour tears spilling from my eyes. Through blurred eyes, I peer up at the window and see an Isolate clawing at the panes.

  It appears larger than any Isolate I’ve ever seen, human sized, and only as it calls my name do I recognize the voice and realize this is no Isolate out to get me.

  It’s Shea.

  She’s knocking frantically at the glass, and all I can assume at this frantic moment is that an Isolate is after her. With great difficulty, I climb to my feet and motion for her to come around the side of the house. I turn away and step as quickly as I can (which isn’t very quick at all) into the waiting room. The door here is open and there’s a trail of thick mud on the carpet leading into the hallway. It crosses my mind that some Isolates may have made their way into the house while I was in the office, but remember that I’d woken up in Jessica’s room after being knocked unconscious in their den. Knowing this, I can only conclude that they’d carried me through the woods and back into my house, hence leaving this thick trail in their wake.

  Shea appears at the door. She’s breathing rapidly, plumes of air exploding from her lips

  …her beautiful, pink, scarred lips…

  like bursts of steam from an engine. Her eyes

  …her beautiful, blue, torn eyes…

  as wide as pools, staring at me, pleading for help.

  I open the door and pull her inside. “What is it?”

  “You have to come to my house, please. We need your help.”

  “What is it, Shea?” My (crumbling, numbed) mind knows that the Isolates have begun to play their sick game with the Washburns.

  “Those things in the woods? You know, the ones that kept repeating that word?”

  “Maltor.” Kill.

  She nods frantically. ”Right…well, my father went hunting in the woods this morning, and…and he captured one.”

  "What?"

  “He shot one of them, and caught it, and now he has it in our basement.”

  “Jesus Christ…Shea, this is bad, very bad.”

  Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, Michael. Now this. The little man in my head taunts me, and I try to ignore him, but I can’t
. Seems I’ve just taken another step backwards in my efforts to get Jessica back, thank you Pops-Eddie Washburn.

  “Michael…what the hell have you gotten us into?”

  I grab my coat and put it on. “No one’s to blame, Shea. It’s what’s meant to be, and nothing more.”

  I go outside and we start walking along the side of the house. She says, “Yeah, well I don’t believe in fate.”

  “Well you better start believing, because you’re about to see fate first hand, and hard at work.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  We walk as briskly as we can to her house, my numbed body invigorated from the cold air. Somewhere behind the clouds, the sun is setting, dimming the environment as we make the short journey.

  “What is it, Michael?”

  “It’s called an Isolate,” I say, breaking the number one rule here in Ashborough: never talk about the Isolates with anyone. “They’re malformed humans that’ve lived here in these woods for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. From what I’ve gathered, they’ve got a gene in them that makes them the way they are, and I believe the gene was put there by something…supernatural. Demonic.” My thoughts trigger back to my moments in the woods just prior to me heading down into their den, days after infecting them with the virus. I’d seen the parent demon, swirling amidst the thick fog, a giant wraithlike thing that rose twenty-five feet high and five feet wide, two golden lights burning in its head, a hole for a mouth that blared sick laughter. I can remember the fog glowing as the demon took on a more definitive shape, its skin darkening, muscles forming in its arms and legs as they writhed about, golden veins pulsing throughout its body and igniting its head so that the six horns and braided hair came into sharp view; a thick, black tongue jutting from its mouth, dripping venom that sizzled as it hit the ground, yellow claws emerging from its hands as it reached down to grab a horribly misshapened erection from which tempered puffs of fog shot out in hot steam-engine bursts...

  “Michael…” Shea’s voice shakes me from my morphine-influenced reverie. A car passes us on the road, its driver paying us no attention at all. I turn to watch it, wondering what that person might be doing, whether they’re running a common household errand, or completing some diabolical task demanded of them from the Isolates.

  We turn a bend in the road and the Washburn house comes into view. Shea begins to jog toward it.

  I stare up at the house, utterly unsure as to how the next moments will play out. Certainly I’m no savior—savior!—for the Washburns, as any man unarmed and in my decrepit condition would have a hard time dealing with this kind of situation…much less one rough-around-the-edges and armed. Like Pops-Eddie Washburn.

  “You said the Isolate is in the basement?” I ask as we trudge up the driveway to their home.

  Shea nods, but before she speaks, Lisa Washburn comes barreling out the front door of the house, looking like a whore fleeing some crack-crazed pimp, hair frizzed, makeup smeared, plaid blouse torn away to reveal a cream lace bra underneath. She’s got some blood on her, but from what I can tell it’s not hers. She’s not acting like an injured woman, just a frightened one.

  “Doctor, doctor…please help! That thing in the basement…it bit my husband!”

  It occurs to me now that I should’ve brought some supplies from the meager stash I still have, but it’s too late for that. I stagger up the front walkway, seeing out of the corner of my eye the dead deer, my dead frozen deer, still in the snow at the side of the house, a bib of blood spread out from its pulverized head, painting the snow red.

  A slight twinge of pain twists my wound as I climb the front steps, reminding me that it’s still there, all its agony masked by the drugs in my system. Lisa Washburn nearly lets the door slam in my face as she races back into the house. Having been here many times before in the Phillip and Rosy Deighton days not so long ago, I follow her to the basement steps, smelling a faint remnant of Rosy’s mothballs in the air. She trudges downstairs and I follow her lead, Shea tailing right behind me. I can hear Danny Washburn yelling out, “Holy shit! Oh shit! Oh God!” Grunts of pain follow. There’s a squeaking sound, something like unoiled gears, followed by a terrible animalistic growl that drowns everything else out. And the smell…the unmistakable, rotten stench of them.

  I turn into the cellar at the bottom of the stairs and come face to face with a sight straight out of some horrible carnival sideshow.

  Pops-Eddie is on the cement floor leaning against one of the wooden crates I saw last night through the cellar window. He’s gripping his elbow tightly, just above a bandana that’s wrapped around his forearm. There’s a small pool of blood on the floor below his arm, and the bandana, which I thought was black, is really saturated with blood. He’s clenching his teeth in agony, eyes squeezed tightly as he grimaces in pain.

  But the sight of injured Pops-Eddie pales in comparison to the captured Isolate hanging from the suspension gig in the middle of the room. Danny Washburn is standing a few feet away from it, a hunting rifle in his hand. He uses it to point at the hanging creature. “What the fuck is it, doc? Huh?”

  Holy shit, the little man in my head says, and I have to agree with him. It’s a ghastly sight, the three-and-a-half foot demon suspended in the center of the Washburn cellar, four monstrous hooks stuck deeply into its body, two in the back, one in the pelvis, one in the thigh. There’s a bullet hole in its other leg, from which blood trickles out over a clotted lump. Miraculously, it’s still alive, bending and twisting and scowling as it tries unsuccessfully to work its way free, looking like an ant caught in a web. A thick rope leads out from the block that’s screwed into the ceiling, winding through a system of pulleys to a small anvil anchored into the cinderblock wall. It’s a simple contraption, one suitable for holding a little motherfucker from the woods at bay while waiting for your high-on-morphine doctor to arrive.

  The thing sees me, and its sense of recognition is obvious: despite the pain and suffering it’s endured, its eyes glow gold. It raises its head as far as it can and scowls: "Savior!"

  This time there’s no saving it. This little motherfucker’s gig is up.

  After a moment of silence where I stand stunned mere feet from a suspended Isolate, chaos develops. Pops-Eddie sees me and shouts, “The fucker bit me, doc!” That much I could see. What I didn’t see was the hantaan virus setting up shop in his bloodstream about now, multiplying in his veins like flames in a forest fire. Lisa Washburn shouts at Danny to keep away from the thing just as Danny leaps forward and plunges the butt of the rifle into the creature’s gut. It howls breathlessly and blood spurts from its mouth in a vicious display, adding to the mess on the concrete floor beneath it, and on Danny’s clothes. As the creature fights its bonds, the entire suspension gigs sways back and forth, the beams in the ceiling supporting it creaking under its moving weight.

  Shea grabs me by the arm. “What the hell is it?”

  “One of Hell’s creatures.”

  “Great…now what are we supposed to do with it?”

  I motion towards Pops-Eddie. “Ask your dad. He caught it.”

  Lisa screams, “He needs help! You’re a doctor. Help him!”

  I shake my head, at first refusing to lend a single finger to the asshole, who in my opinion has been served his just desserts. But all of a sudden a light bulb turns on in my head, my ticket to ride illuminated before me like a set of pearly gates at the entrance to heaven.

  I turn to Lisa Washburn, the lines of mascara once coating her eyes now slug-trailing mud down her ruddy face. “You got a car?”

  She nods. “There’s a pickup out back.”

  I turn to Shea. She peers up at me with eyes as wide as cue balls, her unspoken demeanor clearly submissive, but bordering on intimate. Despite the adversity in her life, and the situation at hand, I can see that part of her is enjoying this…enjoying the fact that for once she’s got the upper hand on the man that’s spent years abusing her. “Shea…help me with your dad. Danny, Lisa, I’m going to
take Eddie to my office and treat that wound. I need the two of you to do something with…with it.” I motion toward the Isolate. I didn’t want to use its proper name, because that would mean to Lisa and Danny and Pops-Eddie that I know a lot more about it than I’m leading on, and I have neither the time nor the luxury to start explaining to them just what it is, and what it’s doing here.

  “What the fuck, man?” Danny shouts. “Just what the hell am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Leave it alone for now...it ain’t going anywhere. I’m gonna need some help getting your father out to the truck. Chances are the thing is gonna be dead when you get back. After that, I suggest you send its body back to where it came from.” That was divulging too much info, and I was harangued for it.

  “From where it came? What the hell, doc? What the hell is it? Are there more of them out there?”

  Lisa Washburn grabs me by the shirt, twisting my body around and reminding me that I’ve got a serious problem with the wound in my gut. The pain, despite the morphine, which from the dose I took is still working its wonders on my system, is nearly excruciating. I can feel the heat of my infected skin traveling all the way up to my chest now, making me realize that if I don’t get it properly cared for, I’m a dead man.

  You’re a dead man anyway, Michael.

  As long as I can save Jessica…and hopefully Christine, then so be it. I have to continue trying. I’ve got nothing to lose at this point.

  Except your life.

  Lisa shouts in my face: “You have to help us…please, we don’t know what’s going on.”

  “The only thing going on right now is that your husband was bitten by that thing, and if I don’t help him soon, he’s going to die of infection. He needs a tetanus shot, antibiotics, and from the looks of it, a few stitches. I’ll need all of you to help me get him to the truck. Only Shea will come with me to my house.”