by A. L. Mengel
“I was a friend of your father’s,” she said, looking back in his direction, the sun now making her eyes seem dark and sunken. “Come on boy!” she called, slapping her hand on her thigh, framed by shoulder high coffee plants. “I cannot stay…you must see your father and then go in and comfort your mother.”
The stables stood in the center of the expansive coffee fields, the same fields that Antoine had just walked home from, like a wooden oasis. The sea of leafy green plants surrounded the wooden stables from all sides. Before he knew it, the old woman was standing in front of a large wooden gate, her hand on the handle about to slide the large door open.
“Listen to me, boy,” she said, leaning in closer, and speaking more quietly. “What you are about to see…no boy of seven should ever see in his lifetime…ever. But I have to show you. You may wonder why now. But you will understand later.”
Antoine nodded his head.
She swung the door open, opening the expansive first floor of the stables, dark and hay covered and devoid of horses for years.
“He is back there,” she pointed to a stable at the other end of the building. “He is lying on the floor. You will see.”
She stood aside, clearing the way for Antoine. “Go,” she said. “This is for you to see, not me, dear boy. Not me.”
Antoine slowly entered the stables, and scanned the room. It was dark. Very little sunlight entered the building in the middle of the afternoon, and now at dusk, it was even darker. He turned around to face the old woman, and she was standing there, with an expectant look on her face, and she nodded her head, urging him to continue on.
“Get the light,” she said. “You will need it. Daylight is fading fast.”
Antoine bent down to the right of the door, and picked up a small brass lantern. He held the lantern in front of him, and looked again at the old woman.
“I don’t have any matches, dear boy,” she said. “I am sorry.”
Antoine returned the lantern back to its place, and took a deep breath. He squinted his eyes, scanning the room once again.
He remembered the layout – there were stables with small wooden gates and iron bars on either side, running the length of the large interior space in the center of the building. He had been here with his father many times, back when they still would breed horses.
He turned around once again.
“Go,” she said. “See for yourself.”
And he entered the darkness. He slid his feet along the gravel, feeling the darkness in front of him for anything that might be unseen and in his way.
And then he heard the deep thud behind him. He snapped his head back. The doors were closed, shrouding him in total darkness.
He did not bother to run to the door and try to pry them open. He did not care about the old woman, and he did not care to find out why she slammed him in the dark stables. All he cared about right now was getting to his father. If his father was lying in the hay on the stable floor at the opposite end of the building, he was going to see him.
And so he moved forward, closing his eyes and expecting the worst, and hoping for the best. He tripped several times over large bales of hay, but he did not stop moving forward.
And then he opened his eyes.
He could barely see his hand in front of his face, but small slits of the fading daylight peeked through the wooden walls, and directing his gaze towards the stable where his father would be, he saw a glint of flesh. A large, dark skinned hand in the middle of a floor full of hay. That was all Antoine could see. Focusing on the hand, he recoiled backwards.
“Where are you?!” he cried out, banging on the wall next to him.
But just as quickly as he started to cry, he stopped. There was movement in the corner. Just for a moment, he caught something moving in a slit of the fading sun that seeped through a small crack in the wooden wall slats.
He froze.
Something snapped. Like stepping on a small wooden stick. He squinted his eyes in a desperate attempt to see what was moving in the corner. He couldn’t really make out what it was, but it was not a human form. It was dark.
And it was big.
He chose not to stay and find out what it was. He ran. And then he tripped over his feet, falling into piles of hay. Some tools clanked back towards the corner where the moving mass was, like it might have brushed up against hanging shovels. Antoine snapped his head up. He wasn’t far from the door from which he entered. So he got up to his feet and ran, he ran and when he got to the door he fell against it shaking the wall, and banged his hands as hard as he could on the door, calling for the woman. “Where are you?!” he cried. “Where did you go?!”
And for what seemed like an eternity, he continued his assault on the wall and finally it started to open with a rumbling deep and bass filled grumble.
The thin spear of light penetrated the darkness, and Antoine shielded his eyes from the brightness, stepping back. “Ma’am?” he asked, temporarily blinded by the light.
“I am here son,” she said. “Now do you see?”
He stepped out of the farmhouse into the waning daylight. “See?” he asked. “What is in there?!”
“What is in there killed your father,” she said. “I showed you that so you would understand. There is no sense in showing you any more of this. For what you will take from me later, I will take something first from you now.”
And then she vanished.
She vanished right before Antoine’s eyes, and now he was standing alone outside the stables, in a sky with a fading sun, the orange and crimson fading to blackness towards the east.
She was gone.
And now, left with too many questions, Antoine headed back towards the house. He dared not go back into the stables, he dared not find out what the dark mass in the corner was – or what it was doing there, or what it did to his father. He dared not go.
And when he got inside, he stopped by the window. Standing up on his toes, he peered inside the broken glass, and saw his mother by candlelight. She was sitting on the same small chair in the center of the room, the candle was on the table next to her. And she hung her head low.
“Who was that woman?” Antoine softly asked his mother as he tip-toed across the floor, the floorboards creaking as he did so.
She looked up, and stopped crying. “What woman?” she asked.
“The woman who was with us when I came home,” he said. “The woman who brought me to the stables.”
“There is no woman, son,” she said, shaking her head and drawing a handkerchief to her nose. “There was just your father. It’s just been you and me now.” She cried again.
Antoine rose and went to his room.
*~*~*
The familiar bong! woke Darius from his sleep and for a moment, he didn’t know where he was.
He yawned and opened his eyes; balled up his fists to rub out the sleep. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he looked around and saw that he was still on the airplane. He sat up in his seat, and adjusted himself. A flight attendant promptly glided to his seat.
“Would you care for a drink sir?” she asked with a smile in her voice.
Darius did not look up, but ordered a gin and tonic. He had a splitting headache, something he hadn’t remembered for years, and he needed something to nurse him back to sleep.
The flight attendant whisked around and returned to the front galley, and Darius brought his seat forward. He drew the small LCD monitor from the armrest, and looked for something on that would interest him. He flipped through various cooking shows, rerun sitcoms and music videos until he heard a warm and friendly female voice coming from above: “Here you are, Mr. Savauge.”
He looked up.
The woman before him could have passed for any flight attendant on any airline in the world – young looking face smiley and bubbly, with bright white teeth and red lips, the makeup concealing any evidence of aging and enhancing youthful lines – but what was different, what Darius noticed, was the red hair framing h
er face.
And it brought him back to Sacrafice.
In the boardroom.
When Antoine had plopped down in one of the expansive black leather chairs and spilled his guts.
“I can’t put a finger on it,” Antoine had said, spinning around in the chair to face Darius. “But I know…I know…that I am being followed.”
Darius continued to clear the conference table of the recently signed documents guaranteeing the pair of at least fifty million investment dollars. “And you saw her just outside?” he asked.
“Yes,” Antoine said, quietly. “Just before I came in here. Just on Washington. I wanted to follow her, but I didn’t.”
Once the contracts were stacked, Darius sat right next to Antoine. “I see,” he said, further stacking the papers. “Do you think that you don’t know who she is?”
“Oh I know,” Antoine said. “Claret.”
“Precisely.”
“And I know why she is following me.”
“Of course you do,” Darius said. He rose from the chair. “You know exactly why she is following you. And did you notice something? She knows that you see her. She knows you know that she is following you. You don’t think that this was planned?”
Antoine buried his face in his hands and sighed. “You don’t think that I know that? When I stood there – when I took the first shovelful of sand from your grave I knew – and I knew that I would be opening myself up to this.”
“And so then you proceeded.”
“Yes I did. I did because I needed you. I did because I missed you.”
Darius had looked over at Antoine for a moment.
Antoine had said something that he had not expected, he had said something that he dared not face. Antoine had missed him. Of course, too many times and for too many years.
Hundreds of years had passed since the night that Darius had been placed him in his grave. So many moons and sunrises had passed since he had seen the blackness ensue, since he had seen the coffin lid close.
Close to the darkness.
Darius stacked the contracts on the side shelf and faced Antoine. “Do you remember?” he asked. “Do you remember the night that you placed me there?”
Antoine stopped. He stopped and rubbed his eyes, setting his ball point pen down on the glass topped conference table, and paused. “Yes.”
And then he was there. He was back in France, back after he had met Darius. And then he came to.
Opening his eyes, he saw the starlit sky. The blackness called to him, and he saw the tiny white stars etching their pattern in the sky.
He looked down. He saw that that he was still clothed; he still wore his brown trousers and coveralls and dirty white shirt – just as he had at the café. So how did he get here?
Antoine stood and brushed himself off.
Scanning the area, all he saw was a moonlit field bordering a thick forest. Where was the mysterious man who approached him in the café?
But when he tried to stand – when he tried to walk home, he stopped. He didn’t have the energy that he thought he had and then he collapsed on the gravel path.
“And then you are where I thought that you would be!” A mysterious male voice rang out into the silent night. Antoine looked up and came to.
There he was.
Framed by the moonlight in the darkness, was he. He was standing before him in the moonlit night. Darius was standing above him, staring down at him lying in the gravel.
And then Antoine snapped out of it.
He saw before him a large, dark, glass-covered conference table and was brought back.
“I don’t mean that night,” Darius said to Antoine. “I don’t mean the night that you were transformed.”
“How…what do you mean then?”
Darius looked at Antoine with the look of a disappointed teacher. And then Antoine sat back once again, waiting.
And remembering.
And then Darius thought again of the day he buried Antoine. And there he was again.
And this time, he was digging. He was digging a deep hole in the earth, and the night was dark and damp and a layer of mist covered the ground.
But it didn’t matter to him.
He was standing in the large and deep hole that he was digging, and he was digging it as deep as he could. At a certain point, he lifted himself out of the hole and stood next to it.
Looking down, he saw what he accomplished.
There it was.
A giant grave before him, carved as a perfect rectangle in the dark earth, waiting for a casket to be lowered into it. And next to the pile of dirt was the casket, there it was, the rectangle of wood held together by nails, waiting to be covered and sealed. And then he bent over and picked up the wooden casket that was to be placed into it, and bending at the knees, he placed it below him into the ground, covering it with dirt.
And then he sat back, appreciating the night.
The night was still and silent; there was a full moon, illuminating the cemetery, and Darius looked around, seeing the sea of grey stones in the grass. There were forests on either side of the cemetery; the treetops would blow occasionally in the passing wind, but save that it was deathly still.
“Antoine,” a voice said, startling him out of his trance.
He snapped his head and looked to his behind. All he saw were the trees, and was hit by a light, cool breeze in his face.
“Antoine!” it said again, this time more determined. The voice, he could tell, was soft and raspy. It sounded female.
Darius looked up. “I am not Antoine.”
And then the voice stopped.
He rose from his sitting position. “Who is that calling me?”
And then Darius woke to the plane rumbling on the runway. He was back in the United States. In New York. Away from the answers to the questions in his dream.
For someone, something, was pursuing him the night that he had buried Antoine; and even thought he was Antoine. He had to get back to France.
*~*~*
CHAPTER NINE
Darius looked into the woods, straining to see, but seeing no one. The woods were black; the long and jagged edged trees stood out in their gray shadowiness against the blackness of the night, and when Darius squinted his eyes even harder, he still could not see anyone there. But he knew. He knew it was the Demon.
“Come to me, Darius,” his raspy voice called in the night. “Come to me and I will show you.”
Darius took one careful step forward, the leaves crunching their night frosty breath; and the deep call of the owl interrupted the otherwise silent night. He stopped. He opened his mouth t to speak but nothing came out.
He heard the snap of a branch to his left, which echoed against the night.
Stopping still, his mouth now closed and his lips pursed, all he could hear was the breath in and out of his nose, the night so cool he could see the air leaving his body. He closed his eyes, mustering all of his human courage, all of his strength to turn around and face the one who had been calling him by name. It took all of his might and all of his energy to turn his feet; he turned his feet but did not open his eyes; for if he opened his eyes he would see who it was – and from the times over and over that he saw the horrid face above his, pinned on top of him. He could not fathom what the entire monster might look like.
He felt a chill pass over his body. The temperature seemed colder.
And then he opened his eyes.
And Darius saw the empty, wet and dreary courtyard below the window, the rain still lightly falling, the sun now fading turning the sky to a deeper shade of gray, and a lonely soul wandered across the concrete with no umbrella.
Darius broke his trance and looked down. His cigarette was in desperate need of being tipped in an ashtray. He took a drag anyway, relishing the heat of the smoke being sucked into his lungs. He stubbed it out in an ashtray full of butts.
“What did he look like?” Claire asked, rising to clean out the ashtray.
“I don’t know,” Darius admitted. “He never appeared that night.”
“You never saw him?”
“No. After he called me and after I turned to face him, there was nothing there. Just more trees.”
“So why was he calling you?” Claire asked.
“For the longest time, he would visit me. Over and over. But I never saw his face. He attacked me while my family slept, my sheets would be covered in blood after he left, but I was always lying on my stomach.”
“You never looked up?”
“No. I was powerless.”
“And did your family ever notice the blood?”
“No. I always would remove the sheets from my bed, wash them myself, and if they were stained too deep I would bury them in the woods behind the house. I would bury them deeper than a body.”
“Than a body?”
“Yes.”
Claire made some notes on her legal pad. “So you killed when you were mortal?”
“Yes.”
“What about the blood? Was there ever a time when there was no blood?”
“There was always blood,” Darius said, grabbing another beer and sitting in an overstuffed chair next to the window. “But, I would always fall asleep afterwards, you know? It’s like he had this power over me, and as soon as he was done with me, I would fall out asleep. And, this one morning, the same thing happened. He had his way with me, finished and got up. I know there was blood because I felt the warmth. The wetness, you know? But then I fell asleep.”
“But there was no blood that particular day?”
“Yes, that’s right. When I woke up, the sheets were clean, everything was pristine, like he was never there. Totally different than all the other mornings, when the sheets were soaked.”
“So what did you do at that point?” Claire asked, jotting notes furiously and sitting forward on the couch.
“I got up like any other morning, I opened the door to my bedroom, and I could hear muffled voices coming from the front of the house. But I didn’t exit my room. I felt sick to my stomach; something was definitely different that morning. Something was wrong.”
