Deep in the Darkness

by Michael Laimo

  Christine looked at me. Her eyes glowed gold too, and she smiled. And then she spread her legs.

  And then, with a deafening roar, the creature mounted her.

  I screamed myself awake.

  I sat up in bed, soaked with sweat and shivering. Christine ran to my side, sat on the edge of the bed and leaned forward to wipe my brow with a damp washcloth. I closed my eyes as I ran my hands across the mattress of my bed. My bed. The one I hadn't slept in for months; the sheets felt good beneath my skin and for a maddening moment I wondered if they'd been cleaned recently.

  The odor of something oddly familiar, something...organic rose in the air. Wood burning outside? Rotting leaves in the gutter?

  The leaves...the tea.

  "Michael...are you all right?"

  "Jesus...I had a dream. A nightmare. I...can't explain it...it was terrible."

  Christine kept wiping my brow. "Shhh, relax...don't worry about it now. You're not feeling well."

  I turned my head to the side, mind spinning sluggishly, as though drugged. Yellow light came in through the window and I wondered how long I'd been sleeping.

  "What time is it?" I asked.

  Christine pulled the washcloth from my forehead. "Late morning," she replied. I caught another whiff of the odor. Like chamomile, only slightly fermented. The tension in the room was calm, yet oppressive. It drew down on me like my memories which seemed to broadcast only brief facets of the immediate past. And those views seemed strangely ancient, as if they'd been recorded in sepia-toned stills.

  "You're sick, Michael," she added. "You've been running a high fever for nearly three days now. But, it looks as though it might be breaking. You're down to ninety-nine degrees. I'm no doctor, but as the doctor's wife, I'd say the prognosis is pretty good."

  Three days?

  In a rush of panic, I wrestled up in bed, fighting the fatigue, the dizziness, the aches. "Jesus...I...why..." I was at a loss for words. How could I have been sleeping, or simply unperceiving of my surroundings for the last three days? It didn't make sense. Had I been that exhausted that my body just decided to give up and put me out of commission for all that time? Possibly. But the plausibility of something else taking a role with my swoon also came into play, and that gave me a fright, along with a defiant measure of resolve to battle the circumstances. The battle had not been won. Not yet, anyway. There was still fighting to be done. Finally, I was able to blurt, "What's been going on? Last thing I remember was..."

  ...was that dream. Where the old lady came back and brought you to the circle of stones. Where all your friends played sick roles in some ritualistic game. Where the great golden-eyed demon showed itself to you then raped your wife...

  I ran a trembling hand through my hair; my palm came away coated with sweat. Christine stood up quickly, went in the bathroom and ran the sink. She returned with a wet washcloth in her hand, grinned weakly, then stopped, grimaced, and grasped her stomach.

  "You okay?" I asked. The question seemed to rise from my lips by itself. My mind was utterly distracted with the dream, and the notion that I'd been immobile for three days.

  "Baby's kicking," she answered in a strange, flat voice.

  "We have to get you out of here," I said, my body seeming to move on its own volition out of the bed. "How long did you say I was out for?"

  "Three days."

  Three days. It really didn't seem possible. "Are you sure?"

  She nodded.

  "Jesus, how come I don't remember anything? Did I eat?" I put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and tried to ignore the panging soreness in my muscles.

  "You slept a lot," she answered. "Most of the time your fever ran high. You took your aspirin and drank your tea like a good patient and went back down."

  Drank your tea.

  I went into the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face. The sink had a few spottings of green liquid in it that quickly washed away beneath the flow from the faucet. Green tea, Michael? I looked into the mirror for a quick moment and saw a man who'd aged twenty years in the last eight months.

  I was going to ask Christine if she was still drinking that tea, or feeding it to me, when she appeared suddenly in the doorway and asked, "You never told me what you did." Her face was hard and serious. So were her words...they weighed on me like an accusation of murder—not the desperate hope for success I'd expected.

  I decided not to say anything. She grimaced again, holding her belly (which seemed to have grown to full term), then backpedaled to the edge of the bed, which she rested needfully against.

  "I need to go out there, Christine," I said, referring to the woods. "I need to know if it worked."

  Christine sighed, chewed a bottom lip, then asked with more force than needed, "If what worked?"

  Odd that she would ask that, since I'd discussed everything with her beforehand. And her tone, it was even odder, as though I'd shocked her by actually following through with my plan. I'd explained to her that our only alternative had been to defeat the Isolates—or at the very least weaken them so we could get out of Ashborough. Now, judging by her manner, it seemed that she'd forgotten these details. I looked at her, unable to cloak my confusion. "The tainted blood," I said, quietly defensive. "The Hantavirus. It should've knocked them all out by now."

  "Is that what you did?" Her sudden accusatory tone made me think that I hadn't told her what I'd planned to do, and now she was mad at me for not knowing about it. Although I was more than certain I'd discussed my intentions with her, I couldn't remember actually doing it, and that scared me. All I could recall was that sometime after I grabbed that Isolate and poisoned it, I came back into the house and spoke with Christine in the living room, then passed out and experienced the scariest, most surreal nightmare ever (I think it even surpassed my Page-murder dream in a 'fucked-up-scary' kind of way), and at some point after that I woke up to discover I'd been sick for the last three days, and...

  Automatically, I said, "Yes, that's what I did. I poisoned them. Now go get your bags. There's a good chance we'll be leaving today."

  "Good luck," she said, her voice dry and mechanical. She smiled at me. It was clearly forced.

  "Thanks."

  It was only after I stepped out of the bedroom that I thought of Jessica, and my heart sank into my stomach. I stopped and turned around, looked back. All was deadly quiet beyond the bathroom door. The hallway reverberated with the tension of the moment, and all of a sudden I felt alone in the world. "Christine?"

  "Yes?" she called from the bedroom.

  "Where's Jessica?"

  "In her room."

  I spun away, stepped down the hall and peeked into Jessica's bedroom. The blinds were shuttered, closing out most of the light. Her dolls were lined up on the dresser, a few missing (in addition to the teddy bear), presumably packed away in the duffle bag on the floor beside the bed. She lay in bed, a silent comma beneath the sheets. I walked over to her, ran a finger across her brow then gently kissed her on the cheek. "Don't worry," I whispered. "I'll get you out of here."

  I exited her room and went downstairs, into the kitchen. I drank some water, but had no appetite so decided against eating anything. If everything went as intended, I'd soon behold a scene not suitable for a full stomach. A sense of coldness set upon me. It froze me, perhaps warning me that finishing the task wasn't a very good idea. But...beneath the cold premonition grew a flame of eagerness—a desire to confirm my destiny. It protected me against the chill and gave me the incentive to press on, as though a driving force had swooped down from the rafters to guide me in the right direction.

  There was no way I could stop now.

  I put my boots on and went outside.

  42

  Despite the frigid air, it was the sunniest day of the year. Crazily, I laughed out loud, again feeling insanity tugging on my mind-strings. I had no idea what day of the week it was, or if we were even still in the same year. Last I checked, which had been an indeterminate amount of days ago, it had
been December, somewhere around the middle of the month. Jesus, for all I knew it might've been Christmas Day. Or New Year's.

  As I entered the woods, I looked down to see if my feet were actually touching the ground. In the dream where I'd killed Page, I'd had the feeling of my feet floating inches above the forest floor. It'd seemed as if the woods had reached out to me, had ushered me along as though I'd been transcendentally connected with them. Now, I could see that my feet were firmly rooted to the forest soil...yet still, my body experienced a level of exhilaration equivalent to that present in the dream.

  I took the path of least resistance: the same one Phillip guided me along when he brought me up here that fateful day. The environment seemed newly familiar to me, all the details coming back to me as if I'd begun reading a book for the second time. The sights were the same, the trees, the hills, the bushes, the filmy snow gently crunching under my footsteps, twigs and needles flattening beneath my weight. Far along, the ground dipped and softened, the gentle crunch turning to squoosh as muddy water filled the recesses of the land. The bushes began to thin, and the trees gave way to a clearing where a low fog hung listlessly in the damp air.

  Here comes the circle of stones. It's up ahead, a bit to the left. A mere hop, skip, and jump. Take yourself into it with the same bit of confidence that brought you here in the first place. Let the woods guide you, protect you...keep the faith. The hard part is over, Michael. Accepting what is becomes the end-all conclusion to the entire saga.

  That is, if the Grand Scheme allows it...

  The fog thickened and rose up to my waist as I made my way forward. All along I'd accepted the abilities of the Isolates as being mortal-driven, commanded solely through strength and an instinctual determination to survive the elements. But the breed also possessed a shrewd intelligence enabling them to dominate the weaker race around them, these being the unaffected human residents of Ashborough, yours truly inclusive.

  On the surface it seemed as if Isolates were indeed, as surmised from my hasty research, infected humans.

  Or, were they?

  The fog began to swirl around me as I considered the possibility of them being much more than infected human beings. There was a sentient presence within this fog, in the woods, I could feel it, I saw it. And it became clear to me that it had everything to do with the existence and vitality of the Isolates. The germ had to have come from somewhere, something. I needed to look no further than my dream, and the great golden-eyed demon that rose up from the depths of the woods and raped my wife. This horned beast...it had showed itself as a way of telling me that it had cultivated the germ and transfused it into a select body of humans who in turn became its offspring. If the germ had been nothing more than just a germ, then it would have spread beyond the confines of Ashborough. The germ had been sufficiently quarantined within the limits of the town and the surrounding woodland (yet another brilliant survival technique on the part of the Isolates—or should I say on the part of the great demon who created it?). Common sense dictated that the Isolates were more than just primitive, cognitive-thinking creatures. They were commanded by a much higher force, the glow of their eyes a complex power above and beyond the simplistic chemical reaction I presumed them to be. Once I began to deliberate along these lines, then their mediumistic abilities became all too obvious as well—their capacity to drive the enemy through subjective means was unmistakable. They controlled this town, owned it, and not through brute force alone. They controlled everyone's minds as well. In my case, they made me believe that speaking to my wife would mean certain death to her. They made Christine believe she had been visiting an OB/GYN all along. God, for all I knew, Christine wasn't really pregnant at all. Their real power thrived in illusory tactics, not by means of threat or strength (although their aggressiveness was without question formidable, and not to be easily reckoned with), and there'd been no telling what was real, and what wasn't.

  The fog rose up even further, encapsulating me. It seemed unexplainably alive, swirling and pulsing around me like a toss-up of underwater silt. I felt terribly small and insignificant in its grasp, blind and being led into an inescapable trap. Vainly, I tried to convince myself that the hantavirus germ had worked, that there was nothing to be afraid of.

  Nothing to be afraid of? You think the virus worked on that Demon?

  That was just a dream...wasn't it?

  There were never more unanswered questions than now.

  The trees spread and the fog parted to reveal the circle of stones. I stepped into its center, looking around. Silence dominated at first, but then there was a bit of laughter: low, rasping, mocking. It paralyzed me, nearly stopped my heart, my breath. The fog spread and formed a perfect circle around me, as if to create a broad showcase of light for me to perform under. I stood there for a moment, then took a step forward toward the center stone. The laugh emerged again, louder this time and from a different direction. It seemed to derive from everywhere: before me, behind me, above and below. It filled the environment.

  The fog then began to move upwards. It gathered into a dense form that rose fifteen feet high and five feet wide, amassing into a compact, recognizable shape: that of the great demon from my dream. In the center of the roiling fog that formed its head, two golden lights burned. A hole broke for its mouth, and the laugh blared forth once again. The fog glowed even brighter, the demon now taking on a more definitive shape. Its skin began to darken. Muscles formed in its arms and legs as they writhed about, seeking mobility. Golden veins pulsed throughout its body, igniting its head so that the six horns and braided hair came into sharp view. A think black tongue jutted from its mouth, dripping venom that sizzled as it hit the ground. The creature was almost complete now, as it was in my dream, and I could actually see yellow claws emerging from its hands as it reached down to grab its horribly misshapen erection. Tempered puffs of fog shot from its penis in hot steam-engine bursts.

  And then it raised its nearly-formed head to the sky and bellowed a sound like nothing I'd ever heard before. It silenced the woodland insects and generated a gale of cold turbulent wind that whipped at the branches in every tree. The ground resonated beneath my feet.

  I peered up at the thing, terrified, awaiting my fate of death. It peered down at me with its glowing golden eyes, then drew its mouth down, the forming lips swelling like balloons and revealing green-black stumps for teeth along a reddened jaw. The wind picked up even stronger, and nearby I could hear branches snapping angrily in the trees.

  Then, as quickly as it appeared, the fog that had crafted the beast dissipated. I could feel the shifting wind of its exodus, the fog breaking up and forming a tornado shape that whipped itself into a circuitous frenzy. Snow and leaves exited the area amidst the circle of stones in a windswept rush. A passage into the lair of the Isolates whipped open from the forest floor, and in a drill-like motion, the fog that had been the great creature sank down into it and disappeared.

  A surge of adrenaline beat back my fatigue, allowing me to stagger forward toward the entrance. Although the fog-beast was gone, the wind it produced remained as strong as ever, and it whipped at me fiercely, sending soil and wet snow into my face. Once at the entrance, I looked around at the coalition of stones that remained undisturbed in their intimidating stance. Their circuitous path made me dizzy, and I swayed and pitched my head forward, gasping for air. I kneeled before the hole, and peered deep into its inviting darkness.

  I went in, stepping downward neither quickly nor slowly, following the tunnel, down, down, down, relying solely on my senses to guide me through the blackness. I traveled forward, unable to see, realizing that if I mistakenly ventured off into one the branching corridors, I might get lost. So I did my damnedest to stay on the path, regulating my breaths with smooth even inhalations, keeping the pace slow and steady with my hands out before me to help guide the way. Mud and water sloshed beneath my feet. Roots from the low ceiling pinched my hair. At one point I slipped and fell in the cold mud, but quickly s
tood up and kept on walking.

  I walked in the blackness for nearly fifteen minutes, thinking that I'd never make it there, that I'd perhaps taken a wrong turn and was now on my way to some indiscriminate exit in a farmer's field. But soon a faint light flickered into view. I moved towards it, now able to make out the dirt walls around me. I hadn't taken a wrong turn. The hub, it was just ahead. I continued forward, turned a corner and beheld the wide-open entrance to the main dwelling place of the Isolates, thirty feet ahead.

  Slowly, I walked forward.