Nightwalk

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  “Uncle Ed! There’s another one over there!”

  I twisted to see Casey pointing wide-eyed at the yard across from the driver’s side of the death car. Following her gesture, it only took me a second to spot the threat…especially since it had stopped bothering to hide.

  The creature measured about the size of a large lion, and its frame followed similar lines. But this monster boasted a mane comprised of iridescent black tubules that shimmered as it moved due to the red or purple dots glowing at the ends. And the large, blue head that mane surrounded had more in common with a Moray eel than any other terrestrial creature I could imagine. Only this head featured four yellow glowing eyes, two to each side, staring with mad hunger at the world.

  Heavy muscles rippled beneath the dark scales covering its leonine body as it stalked the perimeter of our lantern light. Bright crimson sparks flickered at the end of the spines starting at the thing’s shoulders and running to the tip of its reptilian tail. An array of large obsidian claws adorned each massive paw. Facing this horror, I once again got the impression of a luminescing deep sea creature that had adapted to land.

  Steaming saliva dripped from between the translucent teeth the monster exposed when it hissed at us, and its “mane” spread into a display of rippling, glowing lines that surrounded the horrid face like a bio-luminescent halo.

  It slunk along the edge of the darkness, glaring at us with a hate we could feel. I could sense this creature rode the thin edge of rage, and it would take very little to provoke it.

  “Hey Ed,” I offered in a low voice, “anytime you feel like shooting this big ugly bastard is fine with me.”

  “Not yet,” he answered though gritted teeth. “I want to see if it will stop moving, or maybe get a little closer.”

  “How about we skip the ‘getting a little closer’ part, and go straight to the ‘shooting the big ugly bastard’ part. That would really do my heart good here, Ed.”

  “Mark, I’d love to, but I don’t have a lot of bullets left and this gun isn’t designed to take down big game. I’ve got to make this shot count.”

  I knew what he said made sense, but the toothy horror-show glaring back at me made it awful damn hard to be sensible at the moment. It hissed and flared its mane again, seeming to swell in size as it did.

  “Casey,” I gulped, wondering if these were about to be my last words, “get behind me. I think it’s working itself up to attack.”

  “Mark, I don’t…”

  “Dammit! Do as I tell you! You’re the smallest one here, which means it’s probably going for you first.”

  For once, she actually didn’t argue. She must have seen it for herself, because now the beast stared straight at her. It reminded me of a tiger I saw at the zoo once, staring at a three year old leaning against the glass of its enclosure. I think she turned two shades whiter right before taking a big step directly behind me.

  When she did, the lantern she carried moved behind me as well, casting a long shadow straight out toward the circling horror. The monster’s colors seem to blaze in the new darkness and it changed direction to stalk directly toward us. Its tail began to thrash side to side, creating a horizontal red blur behind the rippling corona of its mane.

  It crouched when it reached about fifteen feet from us, and the lashing of its tail increased.

  “Hey Ed?” I readied myself to die. “I would really appreciate it if you could find it within yourself to shoot this sonovabitch now.”

  But Ed didn’t do that.

  He grabbed the lantern from Casey’s hand and stepped forward…giving a loud yell while thrusting the light in the direction of the monstrosity. Apparently both of my companions tonight were crazy.

  But to my surprise, he didn’t get instantly eaten. Instead, the creature flattened against the ground and backpedaled five or six feet. It hissed like a steam engine, yet I detected a sudden edge of fear in the thing.

  Then it rallied, once more spreading its mane and flashing its own colors.

  The horror yawned its terrible mouth wide, displaying rows of teeth guaranteed to feature in any future nightmares I lived long enough to have. But Ed didn’t step back. Instead he cranked the brightness of the lantern to full and yelled again while shoving it at the monster’s face.

  Once again, the predator flattened down and retreated several feet.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. The same type of monster that had slaughtered four people in the nearby SUV, was being backed off by an old man with a lantern.

  “It’s the light,” Ed gasped. “It’s confused by the light. It’s all about the display. It thinks we’re prey but we’re brighter than it is, so it’s not sure.”

  Which explained why the other one had attacked the Sawyers in their SUV instead of us, although we stood right out in the open. These things must somehow equate light displays with size and power, and we presented it with a real contradiction. We smelled like the prey the other killer now feasted on, but we were brighter. And despite the evidence before its eyes, its instincts warned we were larger and more powerful than it.

  “Scream at it!” Ed yelled and waved the lantern between himself and the monster.

  He didn’t have to tell us twice.

  Casey and I both yelled at the top of our lungs. We waved our arms furiously, causing the thing to try and track all the motion at once. Its awful head moved from side to side, and it retreated several more steps under this renewed assault.

  The three of us followed the thing, screaming at the top of our lungs as it backed up…not because we were particularly brave, but because we knew it offered the only hope this had of working. The horror snarled again, its gaze rapidly shifting from one of us to the next as it tried to gauge the true nature of the threat we represented. Then Ed fired his pistol into the air and that finally broke the creature’s nerve.

  The monster turned with a final shriek and loped off. It never looked back, but made a quick turn into the darkness between two houses. I heard its claws rake wood as the thing must have leapt up to climb over the backyard fence. And then it was gone.

  We were alone.

  We had lived.

  And I knew damn well we had just been the luckiest people on the planet.

  “Ed?” I panted due to all the recent screaming, while keeping a wary eye on the spot where the monster vanished. “I think we really need to reconsider our current weaponry.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, breathing heavily himself. “I’m working on it. But for the moment, let’s put a little distance between us and this place. There’s still the other one back there with the Sawyers, and I’ve got a feeling that stunt won’t work every time…especially if they’ve already killed a human.”

  I had a hunch he could be right.

  “Then let’s get going,” Casey grumbled, while casting a sullen look in my direction.

  Apparently I was back in her doghouse again. She probably didn’t like me yelling at her to get behind me like I had during the standoff. And as I thought about it, I found that a bit unfair. I had only yelled at her to try and keep her safe. I’d never known anybody so ungrateful for somebody else’s attempts to keep them alive.

  At the same time, I couldn’t see any point in bringing the issue up now. My aforementioned resolve to be the adult rose in my mind, and I decided to leave matters be. If previous altercations were anything to go by, making an issue out of it would only make things worse.

  Besides, I had other matters to focus on.

  “Wait a minute,” Casey frowned, and pointed into the darkness ahead. “What’s that? I don’t remember anything like that being here.”

  We stopped right at the spot entering the intersection of Monroe and Chambers Circle, and squinted into the blackness where she pointed. We had only covered about thirty feet from our encounter with the last monster, and I began to wonder if we would get anywhere tonight.

  “What am I looking at, Casey?” I murmured as I tried to make out the slightly darker shape in the
oppressive murk.

  It looked tall, and I realized we dealt with an object as opposed to something alive. A big object. It consisted of some black or dark gray material, perhaps stone, making it almost invisible under current conditions.

  We continued forward with slow caution, and I found myself wishing for another flicker of lightning to lift the heavy gloom. Anything to give me a more complete idea of what we approached. The thing loomed before us in the fetid air and I sensed something wrong about it, even before I could fully make it out.

  Whatever it was, it didn’t belong there.

  It appeared to be a shaft, roughly four feet in diameter, and made of dark stone. It rose about eighteen to twenty feet and tapered toward the top. About twelve feet up, it intersected a cube of the same blackish rock. The cube measured about six feet to a side, and featured a one foot long spike of stone projecting from the center of each face.

  Something about the angles of the thing didn’t seem quite right.

  It loomed above us in the dim lantern light, planted firmly in the corner of a dark front yard. Yet despite its recent appearance in this neighborhood, the monument had a feel of great age. An ancientness that made me shudder to contemplate. As impossible as it sounds, I got the definite feeling this thing had been old when man first started playing with fire.

  “Hey, Mark,” Casey asked softly as she peered at the column. “You’re the writer. Are those hieroglyphics carved into the rock?”

  Apparently being the writer made me the resident expert on anything weird.

  I leaned in to get a better look, slightly bemused at how the object repulsed me. I don’t know if it was the angles, the senselessness of the things appearance, or something undefinable…but the hoary pile of stone made my skin crawl.

  The surface of the stone seemed slick, almost dripping in the turgid atmosphere, but I could see what Casey meant. The thing literally crawled with carvings. They were timeworn and only discernable by the shadows made by holding the lantern to cast light across them at a certain angle, but they definitely looked like hieroglyphics of some kind.

  Yet at the same time, they didn’t appear to be hieroglyphics as I understood them. I had studied a little on hieroglyphics when researching a story on a stolen mummy, and I remember how they were comprised of stylized renderings of animals and objects belonging to the world of the artist. But none of these carvings made sense in that kind of context at all.

  Whatever strange hands put these images to stone had been guided by eyes that saw a world far different than the one I knew. And I got the definite impression those eyes viewed the universe with a cold dispassion wholly lacking any semblance of the empathic emotions we like to think of as human.

  I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but I knew beyond all shadow of a doubt I never…ever…wanted to meet the artist.

  Ever.

  “It’s some kind of writing alright,” I answered with a grimace and stepped back from the thing. “But it wasn’t written for us. I don’t think it was written for anybody close to like us either.”

  “I believe it,” she muttered.

  “That being the case, how about we move on and get away from this thing?”

  “Yeah,” she whispered back. “Yeah, I think that might be a good idea.

  Her wariness of the thing didn’t surprise me. The structure simply had something repulsive about it.

  It made me think of Atlantis again, or some other city from before the dawn of prehistory now buried under miles of black water. I couldn’t help but feel this thing belonged on the bottom of an ocean somewhere, hidden from the sunlit world by both time and darkness. I also couldn’t help but think it represented a tiny part of something far larger.

  A sign maybe? A monument?

  Or a warning.

  Regardless, we could neither fathom nor do anything about it, and we now stood at the mouth of Chambers Circle with nowhere else to go.

  The entrance yawned before us…another dark, flag-lined, tree-shrouded passage on a route filled with a whole lot more of the same. At least in this case it would widen out at the end, and hopefully give me a glimpse of sky before we plunged between houses and attempted to ford night-time ditches. Maybe it came from simple claustrophobia due to all the overhanging branches, but I really wanted to get a look at the sky.

  So we set off down our new path, and I tried to take comfort in the fact we had left one more milestone behind us. But at the same time I could see in the faces and postures of my companions that the latest encounters had taken their toll.

  Casey’s face looked thin and pale, and her eyes looked haunted. The confrontation with these latest beasts had left its mark on her. I now knew some real toughness lay under all that surliness, but I could also tell her confidence had really been shaken. Knowing you would likely be the preferred target of every horror you met would do that to anybody. Truthfully, seeing her like this almost made me wish the glares were back.

  Ed didn’t look too good again either, but for different reasons. He definitely walked with a slight limp now, although the rasp-click that accompanied him hadn’t slowed down. He wasn’t in bad shape for an old, one-legged man with a damaged prosthetic…but the fact he was an old, one legged man with a damaged prosthetic trying to keep up with two much younger people on a high-stress forced march had already started to show.

  This pretty much left me as the lone, healthy, adult male in the trio…which taking into account me being no spring chicken, my primary exercise being typing, and my main experience with action and trouble being what I made up for Mitchell Notch in my books, meant we were probably in deep trouble if things got rough. I needed Ed as close to the top of his game as possible, and I knew it. And right now, he didn’t look anywhere near that.

  “Hey, Ed?” I spoke up. “Anytime you want to take a break, let us know.”

  “Will do.”

  “I’m serious,” I insisted, “I’d rather you pace yourself for the long run than wear yourself out. Tired people make mistakes, and I don’t think we have much room for those tonight.”

  “I hear you,” he grunted, “but how about we take that break once we reach the end of the circle. I’d like to actually get somewhere without stopping for once.”

  “Suits me,” I agreed.

  I knew we had been stopping and starting, but he hadn’t had a chance to sit down the whole time. Stopping to help the lady under the flowers, or dealing with the Sawyers hadn’t really been rest. Thankfully, the end of Chamber’s Circle shouldn’t be too far ahead.

  But as I looked over at him to plan our stop, the lightning flickered again…and I saw something that made my blood run cold.

  The barest of motion caught my eye and I turned to peer behind us to catch a better look. Fortunately, the lightning did one of those double flickers, revealing the object of my search.

  The large horror we had scared off with the lantern sat staring at us in the middle of the street at the intersection. Its four yellow eyes glared with frustrated rage. And something about the way it sat there, following our progress, gave me the impression of predatory calculation.

  It was thinking things through.

  Then the lightning faded and darkness swallowed the scene.

  “Uh, Ed?” I tried to keep my voice level. “Any ideas on our weaponry problem? Our glow in the dark friend is back there in the intersection watching us, and I’ve got a feeling he hasn’t totally decided to give up yet.”

  “Oh shit,” Casey breathed, once again going pale.

  “I was afraid of that,” Ed replied. “Big predators are seldom stupid.”

  “So now what?”

  “Right now, we’re going to keep moving at a nice casual pace. Don’t act like prey. I’ll turn the lantern back to full brightness to try and give it something to think about. I hate doing it because I don’t know if it will last till dawn at that setting, but right now I don’t see any choice.”

  That didn’t sit well with me either. The idea of be
ing without the lantern scared me almost as bad as the creature behind us. It was our sole comfort in a world gone very strange and deadly.

  “I’m not sure that’s enough of a solution,” I muttered as I peered into the darkness behind us. The brightened lantern pushed back the night a bit, but not near enough to suit me. “If the thing is tailing us, we ought to consider a more defensible location than out here in the street.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “I’m suggesting we consider the idea of breaking into one of these houses.”

  I could see Ed thinking about it, but to my surprise he didn’t seem to like the idea very much.

  “I’m not really sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, we don’t know what’s in those houses. If my place is anything to go by, then things are appearing inside houses as well. We might end up caught between two monsters instead of getting away from one, and maybe with something even worse than the bastard back there.”

  For a second I tried to imagine what could possibly be worse than the toothy horror stalking us…then I remembered the thing in the storm drain. The idea of breaking into a dark house and running into something like it put a quick damper on my enthusiasm for the plan.

  But it still left us out on the street with a large predator closing in…

  …check that…

  Another flash of lightning revealed the monster had risen to its feet and now stalked slowly in our direction. Yet it was the sight of its larger and more gruesome companion that caused my heart to leap into my throat.

  There were now two of them stalking us.

  Another beast had joined in the hunt, and this one looked more terrifying than its partner. It loomed half again as large and had a pale head with dark blotches around the eyes, giving it an almost skullish appearance. The stains around its mouth told me this horror had been the creature slaughtering the Sawyers.

  Apparently it either ate fast, or it preferred killing to eating. From the look of it, I leaned toward the latter.