Return to Darkness

by Laimo, Michael

  Breathing heavily, and clutching my pained midsection, I lean against the house and do my best to gather the strength, the will, to carry on.

  Michael, you know that Christine is inside. She told Jessica to come here for her, and she will be grateful for your efforts.

  I face the door.

  Press the hook against the rotted wood.

  It creaks open, slowly…slowly…slowly. The interior of the barren room comes into view, gray light seeping in through the dirty windows. I am immediately reminded of how I killed Old Lady Zellis, her bloodstains still thick, still tacky on the dusty wood floor; it’s been only a week, perhaps a day more (God, I’ve lost count of time) since I yanked the broken broomstick out of the side of her neck and back into her throat.

  I step into the room, the hook held out before me. The broken pottery is still here. The dust is still here. And in it on the moldy wood floor, a pair of human footprints leading down into the basement.

  I take a deep breath of bitter air. For a moment I think back to the very moment I first stepped into this room, how I wondered at the time if I were being psychologically influenced by the Isolates, just as Christine and Jessica had when they came to this decrepit place, thinking all along it was a doctor’s office. Now, again, I struggle with the same fears: could this journey be yet another element in the grand scheme of the Isolates? Or am I being deceived by my fever, by crumbled mind? Am I in control, or am I not?

  Once again, terrible déjà vu creeps up on me, and by the time I peer down into the cellar, it assaults me like a sudden strike over the head.

  I’ve done this all before.

  The air here tastes bitter, of age and dust and of the terrible herb Old Lady Zellis brewed…

  The old witch was hunkered down before Christine, large calloused hands cupping a wriggling mound of jelly-like substance she’d scooped out of a wooden basin. She smeared it on Christine’s distended abdomen, using two yellow-clawed fingers to paint odd hieroglyphs upon her skin…

  It’s at this moment I realize how much my life has slipped away from me, how oddly foreign my past and the lives of my family have become—as dark and foreign as this house is to me. I can barely remember their faces, Christine’s pure skin and red lips, Jessica’s blonde curls and crystal blue eyes, as if they existed only as fleeting dream people in a single night’s escapade. And then, as I try desperately to gather images of contentment having taken place among us, only dark shadows arise in my memory, erasing everything that happened prior to us coming to Ashborough nine months ago.

  I peer down the stairwell, set in near-total darkness. Below, somewhere in the cellar, candles flicker, a gentle orange glow dancing against the cinderblock walls at the bottom of the steps. I’ve done this all before. And those clear and disturbing memories of having searched for Christine here in the recent past, a week ago, leaves me nearly overcome with dread.

  What will I find down here?

  She’s down there Michael, hiding from the Isolates, waiting for you to come and save her.

  The first wooden step meets my foot with a harsh creak. I leap from my skin and claw at my chest, never so nervous in my life. With no banister, I grip the cinderblock wall for support. The lower half of the staircase waxes and wanes in the flickering candlelight. My head begins to spin. I feel like throwing up and I heave a couple times, but nothing comes up except a bullet of pain from my gut.

  Heart thumping hard, I take another step, telling myself that going down these steps is the be-all and end-all of my time here in Ashborough. I will either die in this basement, or escape from it. Whether Christine is with me still remains to be determined. I don’t even know if she’s down there, despite the footprints in the dust upstairs.

  Might be a trick, Michael. Might be someone else down here. You know how the Isolates operate. They’re cunning little motherfuckers.

  That they are.

  I take another step. The loud creak reminds me that not only are the Isolates physically intimidating, but they also retain a strong extrasensory power. With this in mind, I cannot exclude the possibility that I may now be under some form of hypnosis, one leading me to believe that my wife has returned to her normal self—just as Jessica has—and is down here now, awaiting my arrival. It’s no different than the trance that drew me into the woods and forced me to kill my daughter’s dog, that helped Lou Scully cross over from my nightmares into my waking world. So I keep in mind: anything is possible.

  I take another step, dissecting my very soul and seeing that, in life or death, I have no choice but to go ahead with this—to return to the cellar where hell once lived...

  …Old Lady Zellis grinned at me with ireful eyes that glowed gold and brought pure horror into me. Her claws assisted her in performing a dexterous spider-like climb up the cinderblock wall. She perched herself against the beams in the low ceiling, hands pinned deep into the swollen wood. She showed her dark, gnarled teeth and hissed at me…

  With this memory playing out in my head, I tell myself that it might be easier to go back outside to the truck, tell Shea and Jessica that Christine isn’t here, and attempt an escape from Ashborough. But in doing so, would I then be failing myself? Failing Jessica? Just as I tell myself that Shea would step into the shoes Christine once wore and take care of me always and forever, I hear a voice.

  Christine’s voice.

  “Michael…”

  It floats up to me from the cellar on a gust of air, seeping into my ears like a siren’s call. With my hands against the cinder walls, I stagger down the remaining steps, and turn into the cellar.

  And not unlike the first time I set eyes into this very place, an awful and surreal horror meets my disbelieving eyes, making the real seem wholly impossible. A nightmare.

  But this is no nightmare. This is real…as real as the fear bursting through my veins.

  She’s here. Christine. I bring my hands to my face, terror and dark dread rising up in me, eating into my body and soul as I behold my…my wife.

  The thing that my wife has become.

  I take a step toward her, footsteps heavy and ponderous, legs like lead weights. My stomach twists madly at the sight of her, shooting bitter acids into my throat. The scene is an awful one…and then again familiar to me, as I realize now that my wife Christine has replaced what Old Lady Zellis once was.

  Not only has she not lost any of the bestial attributes as I’d hoped, but she has evolved further into a supernatural human/Isolate half-breed, her skin a mottled patchwork of coarse hair; her brutish body naked and glistening beneath the flicker of three candles burning in the corner of the room, breasts swollen and pendulous, oozing with milk; hands flexing, fingers thin and knobby, tipped with pointed yellow nails that curve out like cat claws; and then, her eyes, glowing brightly like those of the Isolates themselves, pinning me with anger, with hatred. She lets out a hiss, like a crocodile sizing up a human threat, showing the inside of her gaping mouth, red as blood in there, teeth brown and dripping. Her clawed hands swipe the air with each hiss she makes.

  Michael, we’ve been had…

  “Damn you, Christine…” I utter. And then more loudly, “How could you do this to us? To your little girl?”

  She lunges at me…but keeps her position, as though wary of my presence—of the hook I’m holding up to protect myself should she try to attack me. Her straggled hair whips into her demonic face across the glow of her irises, the dark pupils at their cores, as she continues to hiss at me.

  She looks just like Old Lady Zellis…only not old. No, this version of half-breed Isolate is more youthful, more lively. Stronger.

  And more than willing to kill me, right here and right now.

  Christine lunges again, only this time she comes closer, those hideous claws parting the air like swords. I step back toward the stairwell and suddenly there’s a weight upon me and a brutal agony in my gut as though I’m being knifed to death. I scream out and stagger back into the cinderblock wall, looking down to see
the baby Isolate leaping onto me as it did back in my kitchen when it first inflicted the wound in my gut. Its hind claws tear through my coat, my shirt, and at least one of them rips into my injury. The pain is numbing, burning, stabbing, shit, it fucking hurts!, its razor-sharp fingernails clawing for my eyes. I can do nothing but flail through the darkness of my eyelids, one hand grabbing the baby Isolate by its neck, the other lashing out with the hook, missing the first time, swiping it the second time…and in response it howls like a wolf in the wild and I can hear Christine’s hissing rise up into a high-pitched screech…and then sensing the point of the hook, I swing it down mere inches from my own face and puncture the little motherfucker’s head.

  Its hands stop scratching my face. I can taste my own blood just as I feel the blood of the little motherfucker erupt out of the wound over my hand, the one gripping the hook, grinding the hook deeper into its skull, yanking the hook sideways, tearing through bone and then pulling the dead thing away and flinging it across the basement into the cinderblock wall, where it leaves a stain before plunging down onto the floor in a dead, bloody heap.

  As my eyesight clears, I see Christine in all her hairy nakedness crawling through the flickering glow of candlelight toward her dead baby. She’s whining in some feral way, not unlike a female mammal in the wild might upon discovering killed offspring. Her head rocks back and forth, and at some point she looks at me, eyes now dimmed to a smolder. It’s here in the shadows that I can make out some of her human features beneath the untamed mask hiding the face of the woman I once loved, once revered.

  I recognize her.

  The mother of my child.

  And then she screeches at me like nothing I’ve ever heard before, face bent into a vulgar mask of fury, agony, scorn, as she once again becomes the mother of the dead thing in the basement.

  It’s only now that I discover that I’ve fallen to the floor, that while the baby Isolate tried to rip me to shreds, I collapsed with my back supported against the wall, legs splayed out before me, a pool of blood like some hideous miscarriage staining the floor before me.

  I hold up my hands, which were instinctually pressed against my wound. They’re coated with fresh blood.

  This sets immediate panic into me, as I’m wearing a coat and a shirt, and still the blood is seeping through the tear the Isolate made, through the fabric.

  I try to stand. The pain is numbing. My muscles are not responding. My head spins.

  You’ve got to move, Michael. Jessica is waiting for you. Shea is waiting for you. They need you…

  God help me.

  I cannot move.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  I sit in the corner of the cellar, helplessly watching the thing that used to be my wife crawl over to the dead baby Isolate at the other end of the room. The creature is laying in a puddle of its own blood, the hook still buried in its head, glinting against the flickering candles. Christine stares at the baby, her eyes dimming and brightening, dimming and brightening. As she reaches it, her head lowers and she sniffs the puddle of blood around it, nose twitching like a dog’s. She prods the dead creature with one claw, nose now investigating the open wound in its head.

  Tears begin streaming from her eyes.

  I try to move. Pain rips through me. I lean to the side and peer up the steps, fearing the presence of an Isolate or two.

  The stairwell remains empty.

  Looking back at Christine, I see her now picking up the dead baby in her arms, ever so gingerly like a human mother might a sleeping baby. The baby’s head, burdened by the steel hook and its dead weight, tilts back and pendulates back and forth like a broken tree branch. Its eyes are open, pointed toward me, upside down, gray, and motionless. I shudder at the scene as Christine holds the baby’s head up and presses it against her naked breast.

  No…

  Tears bury Christine’s eyes. She begins sobbing in a voice much like the one she’d cry in when we used to argue, or when her monthly bill came and she couldn’t find the means to deal with the rigidity of everyday life. I’m very familiar with this cry. I’ve heard it so many times in the past. It brings back memories stretching from my days as a young intern when I first met my future wife, to the very moment we moved into the house at 17 Harlan Road and she began sobbing on our front lawn, unsure if she were pleased or unhappy with the move.

  She sounds so human.

  Go ahead Michael, it’s why you came here. To save her.

  And suddenly, in my line of sight I see not the monster my wife has become, but the beautiful woman I stood at the altar with, whose eyes I stared in and vowed to love and protect till death do we part. She appears to me unblemished, her skin pristine, clear of dark filthy hair and rough patches. Struggling with my thoughts, I can’t help but think back to the moment I saw Old Lady Zellis change from an evil witch into a beautiful goddess, right before my eyes…

  She was...beautiful. Suddenly everything I’d feared and suffered seemed extraordinarily distant...all I wanted was her, her beauty and the grace with which she hugged the wall, the way she grinned—so seductively—how she used one single feminine hand to call me to her…

  And now Christine, transformed into the woman she once was, nursing the dead baby, it took a picture of the boy I always thought we’d have together—before I found out that it wasn’t my baby she’d become impregnated with…

  Christine shed her clothing and sat down on the center stone. Her eyes were empty and glazed, staring up at the great creature who stepped out from behind the stone. Its entire body rippled like water, as though insects crawled beneath the surface of its skin. It leaned down on its knees, one claw breaking its fall, the other gripping what appeared to be its penis, a black mottled spade erect and secreting yellow fluid. Its eyes glowed a miraculous gold. Christine looked at me, her eyes glowing gold too. She smiled and spread her legs. With a deafening roar, the creature mounted her…

  I shake the nightmare from my head, peering again at my wife, a single word falling from my lips, unleashed from my broken mind like a tiger from a cage.

  “Christine…”

  And in the very instant the whisper emerges, she reverts back into the thing she really is, face jerking quickly at me, gaze bulleting out from a pair of golden-glowing eyes, deep, dark focal points drilling me like lasers, burning my slamming heart from my chest. Her mouth opens and she hisses at me, tongue darting in and out, in and out. A venomous pool of saliva rolls down her knobby chin.

  She drops the dead baby and begins crawling toward me, hands slapping the cement floor, sharp claws scraping the gritty surface. Her head jerks back and forth as she fully assumes her Isolate embodiment, brittle hair falling across her glowing eyes, lips spread wide, exposing black gums and brown teeth, a black wrinkly tongue. Winding swaths, carved from the tears that fell from her eyes, meander through the filth on her face.

  "Michael…"

  Her voice is pure evil, devoid of her past femininity, now laden with razors, coarse and virulent. I push a cry of fear out from behind clenched teeth, struggling in desperation to get away. Pain burrows through my entire body, sourced from the wound in my gut. A river of hot blood flows into my crotch, which for a moment warms my shivering body. My hands scrape the rough surface of the floor as I use what little strength I have to pull myself toward the steps.

  Christine is right behind me, clawing forward, inches away.

  I reach the first step and roll my eyes upwards. There’s a figure at the top of the steps.

  A small figure.

  It’s an Isolate…dear God, Michael. You’re finished…

  I scream, hopeful that this desperate cry for help will reach the locked truck out front where Shea and Jessica wait.

  “Daddy!”

  At first I think it’s my CRUMBLED mind playing games with me…that somehow I’ve interpreted the screech of the Isolate at the top of the steps for the voice of my little girl. But at once a second figure materializes, and I realize at this moment that
it is Jessica at the top of the steps, Shea now standing right behind her.

  I reach up at her. “Help…” My voice is weak and hoarse, stolen from the scream I just let out.

  Shea hurries down the steps, eyes widening as she sees Christine grasping my exposed ankle, sharp claws burrowing into me, drawing blood. Christine makes that terrible reptile-like hiss, and I’m envisioning at this moment her mouth opening wide, aiming to take a bite out of me.

  Shea grabs my arms, squeezes tightly and pulls, dragging me to the bottom step. “Michael…I can’t drag you up the stairs!”

  Jessica is right behind her, staring past me, toward the thing that used to be her mother. “Mommy! No, don’t hurt Daddy! Please!”

  Behind me, more hissing. And then, "Jesssssica…"

  Tears explode from Jessica’s eyes. “Mommy…” she utters, fear melting from her voice, supplanted with a monotone of hypnotic influence.

  I scream at my daughter, “Jessica! Don’t look at her!”, knowing that Christine’s eyes must be on fire with their golden effect, drawing Jessica in deeply.

  Shea yanks on my arms…then lets go. I shout out in pain as bullets shoot from my gut in all directions. “Please Michael, hurry!”

  I reach up, grab the second step, and with a lunge pull myself up…dragging Christine with me as she secures her hold on my ankle.

  "Jessssicaaaaa…"

  Shea sidesteps my body, slipping slightly on the drops of blood sprung from my wound. She grunts and at once I see her kick out with her combat boot. I hear the contact on Christine’s head, a muffled thud that sends goose flesh racing up and down my spine. Christine howls out and her grip loosens a bit on my ankle. Shea stomps on her again, once, twice, three times. The fourth kick proves successful in releasing Christine’s painful hold on me. On all fours, I clamber up the steps, following Jessica as she scurries from the horrific scene playing out below her.