Nightwalk

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  No, this didn’t feel like an invasion at all.

  It felt like an encroachment.

  Even the varied nighttime noises were different, although it would have been hard for me to put a finger on how. Maybe it came from the lack of normal sounds one is used to hearing in a neighborhood like this on an ordinary night. The buzz of central air units running, the hum of distant traffic, the occasional radio, or voice of somebody talking in their yard…I heard none of that now.

  The hush surrounding us made me think of walking through a graveyard, and I once again cast a nervous glance at the silent houses.

  But it was that same hush that gave us warning before we encountered the first true nightmare of the evening.

  “Shhh!” Casey hissed…as if any of us were talking in the first place. “Do you guys hear something?”

  We stopped and strained our ears for anything in the unnatural hush. As it turned out, we heard it right away. I guess the mere act of walking and thinking can make enough noise to mask soft sounds…in this case a faint dragging, or rasping from the darkness ahead of us.

  Imagine wearing a tennis shoe, then dragging it swiftly across a concrete surface. Now do it with several different tennis shoes, all repeatedly at the same time. It sounded like a group of kids scuffing their feet.

  And it didn’t sound very far ahead.

  “It’s coming from a little off to the left,” Casey whispered. “I think it’s down near the intersection. If we go a little farther, I think we’ll be able to see it.”

  “Casey, I’m not sure that’s such a…”

  “She’s right, Mark,” Ed murmured. “No point in trying to be too sneaky. We’re standing here holding a lantern, so it can already see us anyway. Besides, it might be nothing.”

  Nothing my ass. This thing sounded alive.

  At the same time, I couldn’t deny Ed’s point about our visibility. We carried the only source of light in the entire area. Anything with eyes could spot us two blocks away. The fact the light didn’t seem to penetrate as far as it should in this dense atmosphere didn’t help matters either.

  We wouldn’t be sneaking up on anybody tonight.

  “Okay,” I whispered back, shifting my grip on the tire iron. “I guess I can’t argue with that. How do you want to do this?”

  “Slowly,” he answered. “And Dodger, I want you to move over between me and Mark.”

  Casey nodded and did as instructed, her eyes wide and face tight. He handed her his cane as she went past and drew his pistol. If I hadn’t been so nervous and distracted at the time, I would have probably been annoyed at how she so willingly complied with directions from Ed. But at the moment, I just felt relief at having her in a safer position so I could focus a little more attention on other matters.

  We eased forward, almost as if we were trying to push our circle of light ahead of as we advanced. The scuffing sound grew closer, then stopped as if sensing our approach and waiting to see what we would do. We paused a second ourselves…listening. Then it resumed with an even more frantic pace than before. With nowhere else to go but back, we resumed our slow advance as well.

  “Ohhhhh…I think I’m starting to see it,” Casey informed us. “It’s down by the storm drain on the left side of the street.”

  The source of the noise grew clearer in the lantern light…and as it did, the last hope of sanity this night had to offer vanished.

  The thing scrabbling at the asphalt before us belonged in some opium user’s delirium. Or at least what we could see of it.

  Instead of being “down by the storm drain,” the creature inhabited the storm drain itself. And now it fought to get out.

  A cluster of long, pale legs sprouted from the storm drain and arced a good six to eight feet to where they clawed and scraped at the road. I want to say they were insectile in nature, but it appeared they had an interior skeleton, making them look as much like spidery fingers as legs. They were covered in hard-looking, yellowish-white flesh that gave me the impression they had never seen sunlight, and each one ended in a single red claw nearly a foot long.

  I couldn’t imagine what might be on the other end of those pale limbs.

  The tempo of the monstrosity’s struggles increased. Legs and claws flailed at the asphalt as whatever resided within the drain sought purchase to pull itself free. And as the thing’s agitation obviously increased, large purple rings appeared across the surface of its skin like some form of weird camouflage or warning coloration. I think they actually glowed.

  We took several steps back as a group, eyes fixed on the horror.

  “Mark?” Ed asked out the side of his mouth. “Any ideas on what that is…because I’m drawing a blank here.”

  I could only shake my head, utterly speechless in the face of madness made flesh.

  The growl at the door in Ed’s garage had frightened me, and I had instinctively known then I dealt with something monstrous. But I hadn’t actually seen the thing, so I could still rationalize the experience to fit it into a world that still made sense. But this time, I couldn’t deny the evidence scuttling and clawing before us.

  Nothing like this had ever walked the earth before…but it now writhed before our eyes as an irrefutable reality.

  “What do we do now?” Casey whispered between us.

  “I don’t know,” I gulped. “But whatever it is, we need to do it before that thing gets out.”

  “We could go back to…”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Dodger,” Ed interrupted. “We already know deadly stuff is back there too. And I get the feeling this kind of stuff is only going to get thicker. I think we need to go around this thing and get out of here.”

  As if to emphasis his point, a weird hooting call came from the darkness behind us.

  “Okay.” I eyed the monster with revulsion. “But it can almost reach halfway across the road.”

  “Yep. But that gives us the other side of the road. Besides, it’s only two more houses until this street ends and we’ll be making a right turn anyway.”

  It’s funny how none of us considered simply going up into the front yards and cutting across at the time. I think we subconsciously knew, even then, that staying on the asphalt would be safer. Not safe…but safer. I guess because it was man-made, and the night around us felt wilder by the moment.

  Not to mention, if something this awful lurked in a storm drain, then what might be hiding on the other side of a hedge or backyard fence?

  Ed gestured toward the curb on the right-hand side and we dutifully started moving that way. He held the lantern up at chest level to keep his cane hanging securely on his arm, but kept the gun pointed firmly at the wriggling monstrosity as he followed. Then, ever so carefully, we began edging past the thing.

  As we came even with it, it froze once again. All of those clawed legs/fingers went still, and we stopped to see what to make of this new development. In some ways the sudden inaction of the thing seemed more terrifying than the thrashing...as if the thing had realized the futility of its current course of action and now considered its next move. It looked like a pale tarantula half out of a hole, only with a few extra legs thrown in.

  A strange, deep gurgling sound came from the darkness behind the now still appendages, and then they slowly withdrew back into the drain. I sensed something chillingly deliberate in the action, and I swiftly looked around to see if there were any other storm drains, maybe with bigger holes, nearby. Seeing nothing in the limited range of the lantern light, I returned my gaze to the storm drain…

  …only to discover something looked back at me.

  A single, enormous eye.

  It glared out at us from the darkness of the drain. A lone, cyclopean eye that must have spanned nearly a foot across. It’s golden, heavily striated iris reflected the lantern light back at us, featuring a pupil resembling a rounded hourglass lying on its side. It was inhuman, utterly alien, and while I’m not sure if intelligence lurked in its depths or not, it definitely
looked out on the world with hunger.

  “Keep moving,” Ed urged, his pistol pointed straight at the eye. “The sooner we put distance between us and that thing, the better I’ll feel.”

  I felt Casey poke me in the back in agreement.

  “Right,” I acknowledged with feeling, and started moving again.

  I forced myself to tear my gaze from the eye and focus on the world around me. I would have to trust Ed to keep tabs on the threat from the storm sewer. We needed to move on. This put me in front with nothing but a tire iron between me and whatever else lurked out there, so it behooved me to pay attention.

  We shuffled down the gutter on the opposite side of the street in single file. Once again I became aware of the brooding houses barely visible in the light of our lantern. Their dark windows seemed to watch us pass with sullen hostility. Something about them truly unnerved me, and I picked up the pace to get past the horror in the storm drain so I could move back to the middle of the street.

  By the time we made it away from the curb, we had almost reached the point where Ed’s circle emptied out onto Culver Street. Back in our former side-by-side arrangement, we carefully made our way to the intersection and peered both directions into the darkness. As we did, I became painfully aware we were now the only light source visible for blocks in three directions. It made me feel extremely vulnerable, as if hungry eyes now peered at us from all angles.

  “Hey, Ed?

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m curious, how fast can you turn the lantern off?”

  “Fairly quick. Why?”

  “Just wondering. I guess your point about things seeing us before we see them is really hitting home.”

  He went quiet for second, and I could feel him studying me…probably trying to get a gauge on my nerves at the moment. Considering the circumstances, I couldn’t blame him. I guess I passed muster, because he continued.

  “Mark, the thing in the storm drain…did you see the size of its eye?”

  “How could I miss it? It must be huge!”

  “Maybe, but that’s not my point.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is, with an eye that big to gather light, it can see in the dark a whole hell of a lot better than we can. So turning off our lantern won’t help anything. It will only give the monster more of an advantage if it finds a way to get out and comes up behind us. If that happens, I’d like to have a chance to see it coming.”

  “Yeah,” I suppressed a shudder and spared a glance behind, “I guess I see your point.”

  “So what’s the plan, Uncle Ed?”

  Ed gestured to the right with his lantern.

  “We’re gonna take Culver Street west three blocks to Monroe. Then we’ll turn north again and head up to Coventry Boulevard. From there we can take Coventry all the way to the front entrance.”

  We continued to talk softly as we headed down Culver in the direction indicated.

  “But do we really want to get on Coventry Boulevard?” I asked.

  “It’s the most direct way. There will also be a better chance of encountering other people who might be trying to get out.”

  “Yeah, but if we go up there using Monroe, we’ll come out only a few blocks from the corner this mess started at. I know this may sound paranoid, but I’d like to put a little more distance between us and ground zero before coming out on a road with a direct line of sight to the place.”

  Ed chewed this over for minute, then nodded.

  “You might have a point,” he said thoughtfully. “Come to think of it, we might be better staying off Coventry until we get near the entrance. If all those policemen are dead, then whatever killed them may be roving along Coventry simply because it’s right there.”

  There was a cheerful thought…our neighborhood’s main thoroughfare might be a slaughter zone with roaming killers. And that complicated things in two different ways. First, Coventry led to the main entrance. Second, the other entrance to the neighborhood lay farther to the north, which meant we would have to cross Coventry to get there too.

  Of course, we moved on foot which meant we weren’t absolutely stuck to staying on the streets, but it only took one look at the hedges and fences only barely visible on each side to remind me how leaving the street should be a last resort. But that came with problems of its own…

  “Yeah, but that creates another problem,” I mused aloud, trying to make a map of Coventry Woods in my head. It came a lot harder than I expected, and had a surprising number of blank spots. It’s scary how comfortable we can get in a neighborhood without realizing how much of it we don’t know. Still I knew the nearby area pretty well. “If we turn south on Monroe, we’ll have to go four or five blocks down until we run into Deer Ridge, which is the first east/west street that actually goes anywhere. Before then it’s all loops, or circles like yours. It would work, but we would be going one heck of a long distance out of our way.”

  “Crap,” Ed grunted.

  He didn’t look happy to hear all this, and I didn’t blame him. I had two functioning legs and the thought of going so far out of our way didn’t appeal to me either. It looked like we had a choice between a guaranteed long and dangerous route, and a more direct but possibly deadly one.

  But then the third member of our party reminded us of her presence.

  “We don’t have to do that,” Casey spoke up. “There is another way.”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” I replied. My mental map might have had holes, but not this close to our house. “I think I’ve covered the only two options before us.”

  “That’s because you didn’t grow up here, Mark,” she snapped. “You want to hear this or not?”

  Sweet Jesus, is there any touchier creature on the planet than a seventeen year old girl who thinks she’s been slighted and decided to hold a grudge?

  “I sure do,” Ed answered before I could form a retort. “What do you have in mind?”

  She managed to give him an appreciative look and me a glare all at the same time.

  “Well, when I was in fifth and sixth grade, I used to walk home from school. Back then, me and some of the other kids who live nearby had the same problem…either go all the way around on Deer Ridge, or go up to Coventry where most of our parents didn’t want us walking due to the traffic.”

  “But of course you guys found a better way,” Ed nodded with a growing grin. “Leave it to the kids.”

  “Yep,” she grinned back. “When we get to Monroe, all we have to do is go a block down to Chambers Circle, then go in there. At the end of the circle, there is an asphalt drainage path running between the two houses at the end. It goes to a little creek in back, and on the other side is a jogging path running along the waterway. But even better, there’s another asphalt path running up between the two houses at the end of the circle on the other side of the ditch. That’s Howard Circle which empties out at Stratton Park. We’ll have all kinds of options from there.”

  I mulled that one over for a second, trying to fit this into my mental map. I didn’t know Chambers or Howard Circles, but I knew Stratton Park. It had the playground, gazebo, and duck pond.

  And, as much as I hated to admit it, she was right. We would have several options to choose from there.

  “But wait a minute,” I cautioned. “What about this creek? I’m not crazy about the idea of crawling through ditches on a night like this.”

  “It’s no big deal, Mark,” she answered in a dismissive tone. “There’s a footbridge that crosses over it. It’s not...hey, waitaminute.”

  We all came to a stop and she peered intently into the darkness ahead.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Uncle Ed,” she whispered, causing all of us to immediately go back to a heightened state of alert, “would you put the lantern behind you? I thought I saw something.”

  “You saw something,” I queried, “and you want less light?”

  “Yes. It’s like a glow or something.”

  Ed
turned to block the light going ahead of us, and all three of us squinted into the blackness.

  This time I saw it too.

  An amorphous, bluish glow became visible in the darkness ahead of us. It lay low, as if it were covering the ground in an area.

  “What is that?” I murmured. “A puddle, maybe? Is it in the street?”

  “Maybe,” Casey whispered back. “It’s off to the right, and I think most of it has to be in a yard.”

  “Damn,” Ed grumbled beside us, “my eyesight ain’t what it used to be. I ain’t seeing this.”

  “It’s faint, Uncle Ed. And our eyes are adjusted to the lantern light. It might show up better when we get closer.”

  I started to object to her automatic assumption we would move forward, then bit it off. Of course we would be moving forward, especially since our only alternative would be to stand there for the rest of the night. I still didn’t have to be happy about it though.

  “Okay, but let’s be real careful,” I added softly. “Whatever this is, it ain’t stuck in a storm drain.”

  “Right.”

  Ed lowered the brightness of the lantern, and we moved cautiously down the street. I strained my eyes to make out the phenomenon ahead. It definitely covered the ground, and I now discerned two distinct areas of it. The smaller patch lay in the street ahead, while the much larger blob covered most of what had to be the yard nearby.

  “It looks like some kind of spill or something,” I whispered, and squinted ahead.

  “I see it now, too.”

  “Actually,” Casey, whose teenage eyes seemed to be functioning the best this night, announced, “it looks like it’s made out of little dots.”

  “Dots?”

  “Yeah, like stars…orrrrr…flowers?”

  “Flowers?” Ed and I both chimed in.

  “Uh huh,” she nodded, “if it were only the ones in the yard, I would definitely say we were looking at a patch of glow-in-the-dark flowers. I can’t explain the patch in the street.”