by Mark Lukens
Little by little Stella had felt better throughout the day, but as the sun set over the Pacific, the horizon on fire with the last of the daylight, she felt the first twinge of nervousness returning. It felt like the day was ending and that it wouldn’t ever come back again, like the night and darkness would reign forever. Things hid in the dark. Things moved around in the dark and materialized out of the dark. Dangerous things. Poisonous things.
After a light dinner of fish and vegetables, Cole made them each a mixed drink. Stella sipped her drink, hoping it would help her relax. She drank it slowly; she didn’t want to get drunk. For some reason she wanted to be alert tonight.
She had tried calling Maria again to let her know that she wouldn’t be able to make it to the dig the rest of the week, but she still hadn’t gotten a hold of her. She left a voicemail this time even though she really wanted to talk to her. She hoped Maria wasn’t mad at her.
And now it was almost midnight. Cole had fallen asleep in bed, but she was still wide awake. She got out of bed and went out to the living room. She turned on the light next to the couch and grabbed one of her books. This was a book she had picked up on her last trip into San Jose, a book about Mayan and Aztec myths and prophecies. She saw similarities between their stories of monsters and what had happened with the Ancient Enemy in New Mexico and Colorado. She believed even more now that the same thing had happened down here a long time ago, that some of the mass disappearances could be attributed to the Ancient Enemy. She had to close the book because it was starting to creep her out a little. She thought the book might distract her, but it only made her think about the Ancient Enemy even more.
She got up and grabbed another book, a fiction book, one that would hopefully make her tired. She lay back down on the couch, reading, and soon the words were beginning to run together.
Stella woke up when the book slid off of her chest and almost fell to the floor—that would have definitely awakened Cole. She must have dozed off for a few minutes without remembering it.
It felt like something had pulled her from sleep, a noise maybe. She couldn’t remember dreaming anything, but maybe a nightmare had awakened her. Her heart was beating fast, her skin tingling with a creepy-crawly feeling. A heaviness was pressing down on her chest, trying to squeeze the breath from her.
The house was quiet except for the whirling ceiling fan above her and the occasional chirps and buzzing of the night insects outside. The wind was picking up outside and there was a flash of lightning from behind the curtains covering the windows, and then a few seconds later thunder rumbled. A storm was coming; maybe that was what had awakened her.
But no, it seemed to have been something else.
She glanced at the recliner across the living room and remembered Cole sitting there last night, hunched forward, his face blank and expressionless. A shudder ran through her and she was suddenly cold under the ceiling fan as she lay on her side on the couch, her back facing the cushions.
That hadn’t been real. Cole hadn’t been there last night. It had only been a dream. Cole had been in their bedroom the whole time last night, exactly where he was now.
She had a sudden and almost overwhelming urge to go to their bedroom and make sure Cole was still in bed. But she forced herself to remain on the couch, curling up on her side, nestling deeper into the couch.
Lightning flashed again and thunder boomed a few seconds later. She couldn’t hear any rain outside, but the wind was even stronger. The storm was close.
Stella felt something touching the small of her back from deep down inside the couch, something poking at her, something moving around down in the crack between the cushions. She shot up and got to her feet, staring at the couch. A large yellowish-white snake crawled out from deep in the cushions of the couch, pushing its way out over the couch and onto the floor, staring at her and hissing.
She backed up a few steps as the snake darted across the living room to the bureau against the far wall, the snake lost in shadows for a moment as it crawled behind the bureau.
Was the snake poisonous? She wasn’t sure. There were definitely poisonous varieties of snakes in Costa Rica.
How did a snake get into their house? How long had it been inside the couch? It must have been there when she’d fallen asleep a little earlier. Her body shook with the shivers for just a moment as she thought about the snake being so close to her.
She watched the bureau across the room against the wall. The snake darted out from the other end of the piece of furniture and into the kitchen; at least it hadn’t gone towards their bedroom.
Hisss.
She couldn’t see the snake now. It was somewhere in the kitchen, hissing and slithering around. She needed to get to the bedroom and wake Cole up. She wasn’t deathly afraid of snakes—she’d seen many of them on dig sites in the southwest—but something felt different about this snake.
You know what it is.
A soft tapping noise sounded from the window beside the couch. Stella jumped. She stared at the curtains in front of the windows. Something was tapping on the glass out there.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She had forgotten about the snake in the kitchen for a moment as she stared at the curtain covering the living room window. The tapping stopped, but it was going to start again; she was sure of that. Her mind was turning to white-hot panic, every nerve in her body buzzing. She knew she should run and wake Cole up, but she walked towards the window almost like she wasn’t in control of her own body. She watched her own hand rise to the curtains—she had to see what was out there, she had to know. She grabbed the edge of the curtain and pulled it back just as the lightning flashed.
Maria floated right outside the living room window, her golden skin so pale in the lightning flash. Her expression was blank, her mouth wide open, her eyes wide like she had died of shock, like she was still seeing the horrible thing that had stopped her heart. She still wore the clothes she’d had on at the dig site two days ago, the sleeves of her shirt rolled up to her elbows. She raised a hand to the glass, her fingernails caked with dirt, her index finger poking out stiffly. She tapped at the glass again. Three taps.
In that moment Stella knew it was all true. She knew she had really seen Jim Whitefeather in the jungle. She knew the Ancient Enemy was back. She had left the dig site and it had gotten Maria and everyone else. And now it had sent Maria back to tap at her window.
Stella jumped off the couch and bolted for the bedroom.
CHAPTER 26
Cole
Costa Rica
“Get up!” Stella yelled at Cole, pulling the bedsheet off of him.
Cole sat bolt-upright in bed. Stella had turned the overhead light on, the one attached to the ceiling fan. He knew it was still dark outside, but he had no idea what time it was. It felt like he’d been asleep for only a few minutes, but when he looked at the alarm clock he saw it was only a few hours until dawn.
Stella’s eyes were wide with fear, her tanned skin paler than he’d seen it in years. He hadn’t seen her this frightened since . . .
Cole jumped out of bed. He wore only a pair of underwear. He grabbed his clothes he’d laid over the chair. Even though it was hot in the bedroom, the ceiling fan barely pushing the heat away, Cole felt a cold chill dancing across his skin, raising goosebumps. He suddenly felt like he was back in Colorado, back in that freezing cold with something dangerous and unimaginable waiting outside, something approaching their front door, something about to knock on the door and ask for things.
He’d been dreaming when Stella had shaken him awake. He’d been in the ghost town again in his dream, but the town was different; it was the town of Hope’s End. He was himself in that town, but he was also someone else. He waited in the saloon with a few others, all of them frightened of the Ancient Enemy that lurked out in the darkness, the monster that had slaughtered everyone else in the town. He saw a woman named Esmerelda in the dream, a woman he had feelings for, but it seemed like the woman’s visage shimme
red from Esmerelda to Stella and then back to Esmerelda again. There were other people in the saloon that he didn’t really recognize, but he knew them. And then there was David, and David looked exactly as he had seven years ago.
Cole was dressed in a few seconds, slipping his feet into a pair of boots and buckling the belt on his jeans at the same time. He pulled a T-shirt on and then grabbed his gun from the table beside the bed.
Stella was at the bedroom door, staring down the hallway; she was tense, ready to either run or fight.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s happening again,” she told him without taking her eyes off of the hallway, like she was watching and waiting for something to come down the hall. “The Ancient Enemy . . . it’s here.”
Cole wondered if Stella had been sleepwalking again, if she had seen a nightmare that she had projected onto the real world. “Stella?”
“There was someone at the living room window,” she said as she backed up a step into the bedroom. She still stared down the hallway, still waiting for the monster to come.
Cole could see down the hallway because Stella had turned on the lights in the living room before rushing into the bedroom to wake him up, but he didn’t see or hear anyone moving around in the rest of the house. The wind was blowing outside and thunder was rumbling every minute or two, but it wasn’t raining yet. He stood right behind Stella, trying to ignore the noise of the wind, the thunder, the ceiling fan, and Stella’s heavy breathing, trying to listen for any other sounds in the house. He kept his gun down by his side. “Who was at the window?” he asked.
“Maria.”
It took Cole’s groggy mind a few seconds to realize who Stella was talking about. “Maria? From the dig?”
“Yes. She was outside the living room window. Floating out there. She was tapping at the window. She had this . . . this blank look on her face. She was dead, or nearly dead. It’s inside of her.”
“Stella, you’re sure—”
“There’s a snake in the house,” she said.
“A snake?”
“At least one. There might be more now. It came out of the couch.”
Cole remembered the ghost town and the way the Ancient Enemy had controlled the animals there: tarantulas, scorpions, snakes, birds, coyotes. And it had controlled the wind, kicking up a sandstorm.
Just then a gust of wind slammed into the house, rattling the windows. The tree branches and palm fronds were shaking outside. And then when the wind died down, there was a tapping at their bedroom window.
Cole turned and stared at the curtains covering the window. He knew then that Stella was right, the Ancient Enemy was here. Cole had been trying to convince Stella that she hadn’t seen Jim Whitefeather standing in the jungle. He had tried to convince her that she’d been sleepwalking last night. But now he knew that he’d been wrong and she had been right. Maybe he had just been trying to convince himself that it wasn’t really happening again.
There were three more loud taps at the window, a fingernail tapping at the glass.
“Don’t open the curtains,” Stella warned.
Somehow the Ancient Enemy was out there even though Joe Blackhorn said that David had driven the being back to its own world. Cole suddenly felt vulnerable—they didn’t have David here to protect them now. They were defenseless.
“Get the phones,” Cole said. He was still watching the window, the tapping still coming from outside, three taps at a time. He shoved his gun down into the waistband of his pants and darted over to the closet. He opened the doors and pulled out an old cardboard box, tearing it open, pulling out some papers until he found a plastic pouch that was zipped up. He threw the pouch on the bed and then turned back to the closet. Underneath the cardboard box was a wooden box full of bottles of pure grain alcohol. He pulled a bottle out and untwisted the cap, splashing the alcohol around the perimeter of the room.
Stella had the cell phones in her hand, standing very still at the end of the bed. She wasn’t even watching Cole—she was staring in horror at the phone in her hand.
Cole emptied the bottle of alcohol and tossed the bottle down on the floor. He went back to the bed and picked up the plastic pouch, about to hand it to Stella. But then he saw the look on her face as she stared down at her phone. “What is it?”
“David texted me a few hours ago.”
“He did? What did he say?”
“He said the Ancient Enemy is back.”
There was no dismissing it now or trying to pretend that something else was going on. If David said it was back, then it was back.
Stella shook her head a little, staring at Cole. “This text message wasn’t here before. I checked earlier. I would have seen it.”
“We can’t worry about that right now,” Cole said, pulling a disposable lighter out of the wooden tray on top of the dresser. He ripped a strip off of a T-shirt he pulled out of the top drawer and lit the end of it with the lighter. “We need to go.”
Stella’s eyes said: Go where?
And she was right. There was the chance that their truck wouldn’t start. The Ancient Enemy could have already destroyed the engine or drained the battery. But they had to try. They needed to leave now. One thing Cole had learned when they were at Joe Blackhorn’s trailer was that the Ancient Enemy used up a lot of its energy to control the wind, animals, and people. It was powerful, but only for short periods of time. Right now it had been controlling Maria, making her body float outside the windows, tapping at the glass. It was also controlling at least one snake inside the house. And the Ancient Enemy might even be controlling the wind. This was their only chance. The important thing was to get as far away from here as they could. After that Cole could call one of his friends and arrange a flight out of here, even if it was only to the other end of the country, somewhere away from here where they could catch their breath and make more plans.
The tapping sounded at the bedroom window again, a series of quick taps, three at a time. It was a maddening sound. Then the fingernail scraped down the glass, sounding like a fingernail on a chalkboard. Cole wondered why the Ancient Enemy wasn’t shattering the window and rushing inside to get them. David wasn’t here to protect them now. Why hadn’t it gotten Stella when she’d been in the living room earlier? Or why hadn’t it gotten him while he’d been sleeping in bed? Why was it holding back? If it wanted to get inside, it could. It had to be waiting for some reason. But he couldn’t worry about that right now.
Cole looked at Stella again. He held the burning piece of cloth by a corner. “We get to the kitchen and out the back door. To the truck.”
She nodded and slipped her cell phone into the back pocket of her jeans, but she didn’t look confident. She had the plastic pouch in her hand.
Lightning flashed outside. Thunder rumbled a few seconds later.
Cole threw the flaming cloth down at the base of the wall where he had soaked it with the alcohol. The wall erupted in flames. And then he grabbed another bottle of alcohol, opening it up and tossing the cap away.
As they ran down the hall, Cole dribbled the alcohol out of the bottle. Cole kept glancing at the floor as he entered the kitchen, splashing the last of the alcohol around. He pulled his gun out of the waistband of his pants, trying to spot the snake that Stella said was inside the house. He imagined that the snake was coiled up in a shadowy corner somewhere, waiting to strike at them. But he never saw the snake.
Cole kicked the back door open. He expected to see the reanimated corpse of Maria waiting for them, floating out there in the night, but she wasn’t there. He ran across the weedy yard to their Toyota 4x4. He got in the driver’s side and Stella got in the passenger side, throwing the plastic pouch down on the floorboard. Cole slid the key into the ignition after pushing the button down to lock the doors.
The wind was blowing even harder and flashes of lightning were lighting up the darkness for a split second, the wind blowing sand around, bits of plants and twigs pelting their vehicle.
&
nbsp; Cole turned the key and the motor tried to turn over, but it sounded like the battery was already low. He tried again, keeping the key turned all the way. The motor turned sluggishly.
It was only playing with us. It didn’t attack us because it wanted us to run out here to the truck; it wanted us to have a glimmer of hope. But now it would come for us.
Another flash of lightning revealed Maria at the other end of the yard, coming out of the brush, floating three feet above the ground, her arms out to her sides, her head cocked to one side, her face blank and her mouth open. She looked so pale in the lightning flash, like a ghost. And there were other things scurrying out of the brush underneath her floating feet—rats, hundreds of them.
Darkness again. Thunder rumbled. The ground shook.
Cole turned the key again, stomping his foot down on the gas pedal. The headlights came on even though Cole hadn’t turned the knob. The dials and gauge lights on the dashboard flickered. The headlights brightened and then dimmed to almost dark, and then brightened again.
Maria was floating closer to them. The sea of rats was getting closer.
“Cole,” Stella said.
Cole kept the key turned all the way and he stomped down on the gas pedal. “Come on!” he yelled at the truck through clenched teeth.
The 4x4 roared to life, the headlights brightening all the way, illuminating Maria who floated ten feet away from the front of the truck, the rats racing towards them under her feet, some of the rodents were already underneath the truck.
Cole shifted into reverse and stomped down on the gas pedal, squishing dozens of rats as he backed down the driveway and out onto the street, the tires sliding as the rain began to fall. He shifted into drive and sped away.
CHAPTER 27
Officer Sam
Iron Springs, New Mexico
It was late now as Officer Sam Yazzie patrolled the streets ten miles outside of Iron Springs, but he was still alert. It was his turn to patrol the main road leading in and out of town. The empty desert was in front of him with a million stars and a nearly-full moon shining down from the night sky, washing the desert in a milky blue light, creating dark shadows. The night had also brought cold air.
