A movement tears me out of my frightening thoughts. Danny lifts his gun and aims its muzzle onto the ceiling. I for the first time am able to recognize his weapon as a black silhouette. And this isn’t a soothing sight to see. At least my friend doesn’t aim at me like had done Murphy.
“My Cindy and I had kept sitting so for a long time”, Danny continues in a soundless voice. In the interaction with the shadow of his weapon he resembles me like a mortified warrior, who in combat one by one had lost all of his men. “And then suddenly her fingers began to move; very slightly. Her fingers were feeling around for mine.”
Danny’s breath now comes heavier. The cold of day melts with a subtle feeling of horror that makes me shiver.
“Her hand was cool, Harv. Not as cold as the hand of a dead woman, but yet not animated. I knew this. I knew from the moment when she had begun to move. Don’t ask me why.”
I’m almost able to see the shadow shake his head in resignation.
“I just knew that something wasn’t okay. From the way Cindy was moving, the way her cold fingers were feeling around for mine. I don’t know …”
There are seconds of silence, in which the dead silence inside the house out of the darkness creeps closer to me.
“Do you know these films featuring undead persons? The ones we had been thievishly watching when we had been kids? You know what I mean …”
Danny bursts into a short laugh. But it sounds bitter and full of tears.
“I believe that was exactly what had become of Cindy. Her hand … she felt like dead. And her movements didn’t resemble her own. You know what I had thought first?”
Danny puts down the gun and the shadow of its muzzle disappears in the twilight.
“My first thought had been that someone was playing a cheap trick on me. That someone had come into my house and was using my Cindy as a puppet. With strings and all this, and that was also how her hand had moved in mine.”
While Danny narrates I feel a huge hole growing inside my stomach that is trying to swallow up the rest of my life. In my thoughts I can imagine the conclusions my friend must have drawn. Scenery, which rather should have hosted an absurd comedy giving you the creeps but which you nevertheless are able to smirk about. But what I imagine is a painting of the most abhorrent kind.
“Cindy wanted to sit up. She still was full of blood. But she wanted to sit up and I helped her. In doing so I felt that her skin was cold and I also felt also something else, which I up till now don’t want to admit to myself.”
The silence inside the house is creeping even closer up to us, as if it was trying to overhear us; a black, silent oblivion.
“She didn’t breathe”, Danny whispers and begins to weep.
Wouldn’t I know that who is in the darkness of the room before me is my friend and neighbor I would think falsely that it was a little boy, who had been dressed down for stealing apples from his neighbor’ tree.
“She didn’t breathe”, Danny repeats faltering. “She was just sitting there. With this terrible wound at her throat, from which the blood was still running, because when she had tried to sit up the towels had got out of place. And she didn’t breathe.”
Through the dark I again feel Danny’s pleading eyes set onto me. He is searching for the answers to all the things he had told me – and still doesn’t understand; to all the terrible things he during the last days had been living through. But I’m not the one he should address to for answers.
I can only stand there, to Danny being not more than a black silhouette beneath the living room door, and listen to him; giving him the feeling that he was not alone on earth, even if the world around us is trying to tell us exactly this.
“And her eyes..”
I wish Danny would shut up.
“Her eyes were not her eyes.”
His words penetrate the dense scarfs inside my head like the freshly sharpened blades of a sword.
“As you know Cindy had blue eyes, Harv; this amazing, shining blue.”
I try to remember Cindy’s eyes. But all I can see inside my head is a dreary, but welcome darkness.
“This … this thing … had grey eyes. Milky, grey eyes, as if someone had washed every color out of them.”
Suddenly, as if Danny’s words had broken the spell I had been under, I see Cindy before my eyes. In all the hellishness her husband had explained her to me. I can see the blood, colorful and horrible, abruptly flowing from her throat and taking her life with it. Her clothes, which she had been used to lay such a lot of value on, blotted all over with dark spots, her eyes … the eyes of that thing that Cindy had become. Grey, empty … dead … eyes.
The all-consuming hole inside my bowels shuts with an ugly smacking noise. All my fears, the horror and the upcoming panic are without a check cleaving their way into my agonized mind. The terrible silence of the house withdraws into dark corners and holes. All what is left is an awful screaming, which is worse than the silence and turning on me like a famished beast. And this screaming inside of me gives birth to a nameless fear with the air of my Sarah and lets my blood freeze. Before my eyes I see Cindy, her gaze being indifferent and dead and having the milky pupil of a blind person. Then I see Sarah …
“Where is she now?” I ask in a scratchy voice.
Up till now I hadn’t said a single word. And now I don’t feel able to formulate complete sentences.
Danny’s shadow moves scarcely. He still seems to weep. Then the black muzzle of the weapon appears, aiming at the ceiling again.
“I brought her to our bedroom”, he answers, pointing to the upper floor as if the gun was his arm.
I don’t know what this thing is. But it still looks like my Cindy. Therefore I thought I should better compass her upstairs and wait.”
“Wait for what?” escapes my lips. I even regret these words before having uttered them.
“Wait for what”, Danny repeats apathetically. In doing so he loudly moans. “Wait …”
I turn away, looking towards the direction where the stair connects to the corridor. I inside the darkness can’t recognize a thing. But the feeling that in this direction there was the thing Danny still considers as his wife, makes me feel cold anew.
“Wait …”, whispers Danny, and I understand that my friend’s mind can’t be saved by seeing his wife. How I envy him. And how this reveals to me how vulnerable I am.
A morbid curiosity has taken possession of me. I only know too well that I mustn’t leave Sarah alone for such a long time. But at the same time I want to know what this creature that had attacked Cindy in the garden has made of her.
Being strangely sober I understand that this being out of Danny’s garden and my Shoggothen are one of a kind. And they had been hanging around in the neighborhood of my house and if I may still buy into my imagination had even come up to my porch.
This is another reason to learn against which hellishness I have to prepare myself when these beasts one day should make their way into my house.
The coldness inside these thoughts and of the way I’m handling them frightens me to the bones.
In spite of the nameless fear nesting deep down inside my body I suddenly understand that I mustn’t follow up Danny, as much as a part of me might wish to escape this nightmare. If I and especially my Sarah shall have the slightest chance to outlive this apocalypse I have to concentrate onto the basics. Even though the words that suddenly fill my mind may sound like the desperate rallying cries to make one hold out, one knows from mean action films.
While Danny’s whispers are getting increasingly unknowable and there finally is a heartbreaking sob coming out of the shadows inside the living room. I reach for my torch and switch it on. I don’t dare to direct the light beam onto him; instead I lash towards the step leading up to the upper floor and freeze.
The floorboards are soaked with blood. At some spots I can only recognize dark, viscous blotches that have withered into the carpet. Others are shining in a ghastly red.
&nbs
p; The odor takes my breath away. As I let the light of the torch climb a bit higher, I can recognize blood spots and black streaks at the walls. What is leading straight towards the old timber stair is a horrible, barbarous trace made out of blood, slime and the odor of rotting flesh.
As I recognize footmarks that had been imprinted into the congealed blood puddles, it costs me quite an effort to hesitatingly move on instead of running out of the house screaming.
Or to follow up Danny and his apathy …
Accompanied by the pitiful whimper of my friend I step by step climb the stair up to the bedroom. The squeaking floorboards beneath my feet remind me of my own stair in the afar safety of my house.
I don’t dare to touch the flight of the handrail because on the knotty wood I can recognize the imprint of bloody hands. I can’t tell whether they come from Danny or from the thing Cindy.
With each step I climb I leave Danny’s whimper a bit more behind me, till I in the end again am surrounded by a deep, back-breaking silence. I feel like a mountaineer, whose air with every change of altitude gets thinner. My heart begins to palpitate and I breathe with my mouth widely open. The beam of the torch unsteadily and shaky migrates over the dirty ground before me that is besmirched with streaks of blood and footprints.
The odor reminds me of a barn for animals.
When I have reached the resting place I stand still and listen into the silence of the house, as far as my blaring heart allows to me.
Danny’s whispers are getting to me like the anticipation of a breeze. Apart of this everything keeps silent.
The finger out of light nearly automatically finds the bedroom door. The wood looks dark and repellent as if someone in red color had painted “Back off” onto it. The trace out of blood ends directly in front of it. Inside the light coming from the torch I can see the metallic sparkle of a key. There are dark spots onto it.
I cautiously, safeguarding me to all sides, step before the door. I lay a trembling hand onto the old wood that Danny had so often intended to paint anew but never had done so.
I believe to feel an unearthly cold coming from the door and the room behind it. With my heart pounding I hold my breath, lay my ear against the door leaf and listen. Something moves behind the door. A slight swish of clothes is coming out of there. There are two steps between.
I take the lamp, squeeze it beneath my arm so that the cone of light is falling onto the door and aim the gun before me, while with my vacant hand I reach for the blood-crusted key.
I only with distaste manage to clasp the cold, sticky metal and to as soundlessly as possible turn the key. A short click cuts the silence like an explosion. I scarcely dare to move.
But nothing launches against the door from the other side. Everything keeps calm.
In my mind I begin to count till “three”. Even my inner voice sounds tinny and toneless. At “five” I finally manage to turn the door knob and to push the slightly squeaking door inwardly open.
I at once take two steps back, taking the torch into the one and the gun into the other hand.
Like an elderly western star I broad-based pause in the corridor, staring at what reveals the dull torch light. Danny’s words in my mind had created a horrid image of Cindy. But what now like a pale shadow crystalizes out of the dark makes me question everything I had ever cared about. Now, at the age of seventy, my mind even ventures into regions that up till now had resembled me sacrosanct. I for the first time in my life am questioning God and the teachings of his glorious creation.
In the middle of the room, brutally exempted from the graciously all-consuming shadows, stands a creature that has nothing at all in common with a human being any more – and yet can positively be identified as Cindy Miller.
Her once dense, blonde hair in grey, arachnoid streaks hangs over a crown that’s cheeks are haggard. Over the prominent bones tightens a thin, grey, parchment skin that resembles a stone, lending Cindy the look of a long buried mummy. Her eyes that resemble dark holes lie deeply inside of this skull. The grey flesh of her lips is drawn back, which makes her seem to give me a cruel, ironic smile. Her once faultless figure is emaciate and meager, as if her body had been deprived of all liquidity.
She stands in the middle of the room, amidst the limelight of my torch – the most horrible actress, I had ever seen –, staring at me with empty eyes. The upper part of her body is bent forward; her arms sag down. Even the skin of her hands that are protruding from the torn sleeves of a formerly white blouse inside this pale light looks grey and desiccated.
I automatically step back until I feel the timbered wall of the corridor against my back. In doing so the cone of light unsteadily hovers over the ghastly being, bathing it into a welcome darkness, to just directly after again drag it with blasphemous brutality into the cold torch light.
An odor of stuffy air and vomit hits me like a sour wave, making me suffocate.
I think of Danny’s words when he had been comparing Cindy – the thing – with the undead creatures out of countless horror films. In my thoughts I see the figure rush through the room, reaching for me with hands that are formed to claws while an inarticulate moan is rising from its throat. I inside the gloomy eyes of the creature, which is staggering towards me, can even recognize its flaring, moronic hunger for warm human flesh.
But nothing of that happens.
Cindy – I’m bound to see the bizarre creature in the middle of the bedroom still as Danny’s wife and my neighbor – is simply standing there, staring at me and not making a move.
Her withered face resembles a motionless death mask without any emotions. She seems to be looking right through me. But nevertheless I in a horrid way feel these pale eyes that lie deeply hidden inside their sockets are watching me.
“Help me”, suddenly comes as a hoarse wheeze out between the grey fleshes of her lips. A sparkling strand of a yellow liquid drops down to her chin.
A small part of my mind that is still alive tells me that Cindy isn’t a human being any longer. She even doesn’t seem to be alive anymore, as if simply had forgotten that she should be dead. How is it then that she can speak to me? My mind seems to play one of its cruel tricks on me.
My eyes meet the wound at Cindy’s throat – at the place where is the aorta. The blood flow that Danny had mentioned to me has run dry. The skin at her throat from the distance resembles a dark crater landscape out of rotting flesh and brown bones, sticking out of her inside like mutilated teeth. Her torn blouse is covered by a black, crusted mass remembering me of the dried streaks of blood in the corridor.
“Please”, the creature whispers in a low voice.
Her body turns towards me. To hear her naked feet scraping over the timber floor is the most terrible sound I ever had heard. She slightly lifts her arm as if trying to grab me. Her fingers move like quivering spider legs. Then her arm faintly falls down her side, swinging to and fro like the arm of a puppet.
“Look what I have become.”
Her sagging voice scraps through my brain like sandpaper.
“Cindy …”, I begin, but my mind fails to serve me. I unbelievingly stare at this being that once had been human.
“Help me … Harv … I don’t want to become … like them …”
I shake my head, trying to overcome the ice-cold paralysis that has got hold of me.
“What happened?” I hear me ask, in doing so thinking of Danny’s words. Oddly enough the first thing that comes to my mind is the apple, Cindy shall have held in her hand when she stained with blood had come into the house.
“I begin to forget”, the thing moans. An inarticulate noise rises from her torn throat. “These creatures make us … like them …”
“Danny said you have been dead.”
The voice that speaks to Cindy doesn’t resemble mine. I feel the hard butt of my gun against my hip and the cold iron of the trigger beneath my forefinger. Unintelligibly the cone of light, which pulls this deathlike being out of the room’s dark shadow, hard
ly vibrates.
I swim in a cold ocean that drugs me.
“I’m not able to die”, Cindy weeps. Something looking like a black teardrop leaves her eye, in doing so drawing a dirty trace over her grey cheek. “I am like this … creature. It bite me and gave its … life to me.”
The thing takes a clumsy, slow step towards the door.
“I become alike them … I become a monster.”
Cindy bursts out in a shrill, drawn-out howl, as if pressing some breath she had been holding for a long time out of her dead lungs. The noise echoes ghastly throughout the rooms.
I inevitably wonder if this creature still breathes at all.
“I forget”, Cindy whispers. Her voice sounds as if she was gargling with water. “Don’t allow me to forget … to be a human being …”
She takes another step. Her arms are lifting cruelly slow. The cloth of her blouse sizzles, as if one was dragging a case over sand.
“Help me … please … let me die …”
She with a fast jerk throws back her head and again breaks into a shrill, drawn-out cry. A black fluid that possibly can’t be blood begins to drip out of the wound at her throat.
The whine of the creature pervades the silent world like the roaring of a diabolic thunder that rolls over the sky. I almost can feel the darkness inside the house pressing on me, threatening to drown me with its cold weight.
“You’re dead”. I through my own cry try to ban the shaking of the world around me. The cold sweat that stands onto my forehead runs into my eyes, in doing so making them burn.
I’m not dead … I become an undead creature … help me … Harv … kill me …”
Cindy’s voice gets lost in a choking noise. A flood of viscous blackness bursts from her mouth. Her thin fingers ecstatically reach into the air, as if being able to lay hold of me.
I instinctively decide to listen to this small, roaring voice inside my head that probably is the lean rest of my brains. I jump towards the door, the hand that holds the gun seizing the door knob and let the door thunk shut, in doing so hitting the door leaf with the butt, which sounds like the rumbling of heavy boots.
A World of Darkness Page 10
