by Ray Wallace
But what if it never lets up? Huh? What then?
Trying to shake the troubling thought from his head, he found a dry spot on the carpet where he sat down, crossed his legs and closed his eyes.
The outside world is just an illusion. The world inside your mind is all that matters.
And, once again, he sought the eye of the storm—
“Mmmmmm... Mmmmmm...”
—and the promise of peace it offered.
Saturday, June 25th
Dirty Larry’s was packing them in.
At just past ten o’clock in the evening, Jerry had four beers in him and a hot little number sitting in the booth next to him.
“Darlene, right?” Jerry half-shouted over the music—“Bawitdaba” by Kid Rock—blaring from the jukebox across the room.
“That’s right, sugar,” said the young lady with the dyed blonde hair, the too-tight pants, and the low cut blouse. He had never been good with names, seemed to forget them as soon as he heard them, was more than a little surprised he'd gotten it right this time.
“Here you go,” he said, pushing over one of the four shots of whiskey that Betty, a longtime server at Larry’s, had brought over a few minutes earlier.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Darlene with a smile. “Whiskey makes me do all sorts of crazy things.”
“You don’t say.” He lifted a glass from the table. “Here’s to getting all sorts of crazy then.”
With that, he threw back the shot, let loose with an appreciative whistle as the alcohol burned a fiery trail down his throat. Darlene followed suit and he expected her to at least cough a little—it was some strong shit, no doubt about it—but she just licked her lips and set the empty glass on the table. Jerry raised an eyebrow before pushing another shot over to her. This time they clinked glasses before throwing the whiskey back. Then Jerry was looking for Betty, wanting to order another round when he saw David Lees walk in through the front door. The big fellow scanned the crowd for a few moments before making his way over to where Jerry and Darlene were sitting.
“Shit,” muttered Jerry.
“What’s the matter?” Darlene wanted to know.
“Nothing,” he told her just as David slid into the booth across from them.
Jerry liked David—they’d been friends for a long time now—but there were definitely times when you wanted your buddies around and times when you didn’t.
“I need to show you something,” David said to him, leaning across the table. He didn’t look at Darlene, like she wasn’t even there.
“Shit,” said Jerry once again.
Two minutes later found him out in the parking lot, hopping into the passenger seat of David’s American made, four-by-four pickup.
“I gotta tell ya,” said Jerry as he pulled the door closed. “That was some major cock blocking back there.”
“You get her number?”
David started the truck, pulled out of the parking lot and drove away from the bar.
“Yeah, I got it.”
“Well, okay then.”
They headed east through the heart of Hidden Bay, followed a road lined with shops and restaurants and car dealerships that eventually brought them to one of the bridges spanning the river—noticeably swollen and turbulent from all the precipitation—cutting through the center of town. The way got hillier, the road more serpentine the closer they got to the beach and the ocean beyond. All the while the rain fell, more of a light drizzle than the steady downpour of previous days. In some places, they had to drive through a foot or more of water, the big pickup pushing its way through with little difficulty. Nearing the shoreline, they headed north past the rows of fancy estates lining the beachfront property, continuing onward until the sand turned rocky and the houses all but disappeared.
Without warning, David slowed the vehicle, pulled over to the side of the road, put the truck in park and killed the engine.
“This is the place,” he said and, without further explanation, opened his door and hopped out.
With a sigh, Jerry did the same. Once outside the truck, he stood there looking at the black, rippling mass of the ocean stretching away into the distance.
“What the fuck are we doing here, man?” The alcohol and the rain were making him a bit surly.
“I used to come here as a kid,” said David, flicking on a flashlight he'd brought with him. “When I wanted to get away from my old man, I'd just get on my bike and ride...”
He led the way onto the beach, out toward the waves rolling in one after the next as they had since time immemorial. The moon was a dim, gray presence behind the blanket of clouds covering the sky, the stars nothing more than a memory. As they walked, David thought he saw an oddly shaped mound of rocks a short distance away. Not until he stood next to it did he realize it wasn’t a mound of rocks at all. It was a man dressed in tattered clothing, sitting on the ground with his back to them.
“Hey,” said David.
The man turned to look at them. And that’s when Jerry saw…
His skin was like wax, wrinkled and gray, his hair long and tangled with weeds.
Seaweed?
And his eyes…
“Fuck,” grunted Jerry, backing away.
There was nothing but empty sockets where the man's eyes should have been.
“Fucking gray man,” said Jerry, his voice rough, barely more than a whisper.
David laughed, just a little.
“I told you they were real.”
Sunday, June 26th
Awake again.
Not yet five o’clock in the morning and Renee Stover—formerly Renee Dawkins—was up and pacing the carpet next to the bed. She and Emily had been here for just over a week now and this was the third time already this had happened. As for the times she had slept through until a more reasonable hour—she usually liked to get up around 6:30 during the week, an hour later on weekends—she had felt groggy for most of the day, like she hadn’t slept very well at all. This was all a rather unique experience for her as she had never suffered from any form of insomnia before. It wasn't too difficult for her to figure out the reason behind this recent affliction of sleeplessness.
Bad dreams.
Here she was, thirty-three years of age, having nightmares, dark visions that visited her while she slept leaving her edgy and—
Yes, go ahead and admit it.
—fearful when she awoke. Of what, exactly, she couldn’t say. Vague phantoms would haunt her waking mind until the sun came out, at which point she found it easy to tell herself she was being silly, that it was just a dream after all, not some portent of impending doom. But not now, though, with the world outside still shrouded in darkness, held tight in the night’s ebony grip.
As a child, her scary dreams had been inhabited by monsters, bogeymen who lived under the bed or in the closet, making their presence known after nightfall when she lay alone in her room. These more recent dreams had no such imagery that she could recall, no grasping claws or slavering jaws chasing her up and out of the manifold lands of slumber. She knew the monsters were there, though, hiding in the shadows, biding their time, waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves. She also knew that, unlike the dream terrors of her youth, they were not looking to take her away or devour her. In fact, they had no real interest in her at all. No, they had eyes for another little girl now, one Renee would do anything to protect, whom she dreaded ever seeing harmed in any way whatsoever.
Emily.
Of course, Renee knew she was being silly.
There were no monsters then and there are no monsters now.
Still, this did not prevent her from leaving the room and heading down the hall, standing outside the doorway to her daughter's room, overcome with a need to reassure herself that everything was fine, that her daughter was not in danger. The door stood partially open, just as she had left it after tucking Emily in for the night.
I did leave it like that. Right? she wondered. Stop it! You know you did
.
Fighting back her fear, she opened it wider and stepped into the room beyond.
By the glow of a nightlight, she could see Emily lying on the bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, a stuffed unicorn on the pillow next to her. Renee let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding while chastising herself once again for her foolishness. Then she walked over to the bed, leaned down and gave her daughter a kiss on the forehead. As she turned to exit the room, her daughter stirred and mumbled in her sleep, caught within a dream of her own it would seem. Renee could only hope it was of a more pleasant variety than the one from which she’d awakened only a short while ago.
She made her way down the hallway and out to the living room where she stopped and stood before the sliding glass doors. For several minutes, she stared out across the descending hill of the back yard to where the ocean disappeared into the darkness and the rain. And she thought about what might be lurking beneath the waters behind her beautiful home. Because that’s where the monsters she’d seen hints of in her nightmares had come from.
“Only a dream,” she whispered to her reflection in the glass. “Nothing more.”
With that, she returned to her bedroom where she lay down once again and eventually, after much tossing and turning, went back to sleep.
Monday, June 27th
Pastor McHenry knelt beside the bed, elbows on the mattress, eyes closed and hands clasped together.
"Dear Heavenly Father..." he began.
Just then, thunder roared loud enough to rattle the walls of the tiny house where he lived behind the church. He waited for it to die away before continuing.
“I thank you for this day…”
Tom McHenry had been a priest for more than ten years. Before that, he had found himself in trouble with the law more times than he liked to admit even to himself. DUI. Shoplifting. Resisting arrest. Ended up doing nearly three years in the state penitentiary for stealing a car while on probation. And, of course, like a bad cliché, it was in prison where he found the Lord.
The pastor who spoke to the convicts on Sundays offered copies of the Bible to any and all who wanted them. Throughout most of his life, Tom had never taken much of an interest in religion one way or another. He only started attending sermons to help break up the monotony of day to day life in the penitentiary. After the pastor had finished speaking one particular Sunday, Tom acted on a whim and took a Bible with him when he left the chapel. And, again, for lack of anything better to do, he lay down on his bunk that evening, opened the Bible and started to read form the Book of Genesis.
In the beginning…
His full conversion to the ways of Christianity did not happen overnight. By the end of his time in prison, however, he considered himself a follower of Jesus.
Upon his release, he found a job as a mechanic, started paying rent at a cheap apartment and making weekly trips to the church a couple of blocks away. At the end of Sunday morning services, he’d stick around on occasion and speak with the pastor. One day, the congenial old fellow listened as Tom told him about all he’d gone through, his slow acceptance of Jesus as his lord and savior. The pastor asked if he would like to tell his story to the congregation the following Sunday. Tom agreed in spite of the anxiety he felt at the thought of getting up and speaking in front of so many people. But when the time came and he stepped up to the podium, any nervousness he felt seemed to melt away the moment he cleared his throat and said, "Not so long ago I was what you would call a very troubled young man..."
And now, here he was, all these years later, a man of the cloth with a church and a congregation of his own. He had found his rightful place in the world. It had all become so clear once he opened himself up to the voice of God, had felt His presence and paid attention to what He was saying. And he learned soon enough these were no one-sided conversations. God listened too. If Tom ever needed any actual physical evidence of this—which he did not—all he had to do was walk over to the window and look outside.
The storm.
Yesterday, the congregation had been noticeably larger than the week before. The church had become a refuge, it seemed, a place of light and hope amid the weather’s ongoing oppression and the gray feelings it engendered. Tom had recently asked the Lord to help him grow the size of the flock attending his sermons. “More hearts and minds to fill with the glory of your good word.” And, just like that, his prayers had been answered.
"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen."
Tom got to his feet and left the bedroom, made his way through the living room and out to the front porch where he watched the storm—reduced from a downpour to more of a constant drizzle in recent days—as it continued to cast a pall over the landscape.
God’s storm.
Acting on a sudden urge, he grabbed the handle of the umbrella leaning against the wall of the house, raised it and popped it open before stepping onto the stone walkway cutting across the yard from the porch over to the church. A swirling breeze forced him to tighten his grip lest the umbrella be yanked unceremoniously from his hand. The branches of a large oak tree standing next to the house rustled and swayed as a fork of lightning split the cloud covered sky in the distance. A few moments later came the thunder, a deep and ominous rumble.
Tom laughed, unable to help himself, finding the majesty of it all quite spectacular. Stopping halfway between house and church, he watched the show, overcome with a profound sense of awe, as lightning continued to dance across the heavens. Never once did he feel unsafe in the presence of such powerful forces. It was all God's work, after all. Tom had nothing to fear.
When a bolt of lightning struck the oak tree, he never even heard the thunder. He was aware of nothing but a brief moment of intense white light followed by darkness, the deep darkness one finds in the vast, empty reaches of space. Or the bottom of a grave.
Tuesday, June 28th
The work had been going well ever since the rain had rolled in—what, a week-and-a-half ago now? Something about the gray days and the starless nights appealed to him, it would seem. Or if not appealed, exactly, they certainly inspired him. Because his latest creation...
It was unlike anything he had done before.
James Harlan had made a bit of a name for himself these past few years as a book cover artist. He'd done work for a number of indie publishers, mostly of the sci-fi and fantasy variety. Some of the horror presses had approached him, impressed by what they had seen but, unfortunately, he'd had to turn them down. Spaceships and knights on horseback were more his style. Creepy crawlies and things that went bump in the night? Not so much. He could create them, he supposed, delve into the darker realms of his psyche, see what monstrosities emerged. But he'd prefer not to. A long running battle with depression kept him from wanting to examine those hidden recesses of his personality too closely. He was, quite frankly, more than a little fearful of what he might find, of what the process might trigger in him. So he stuck to spaceships and knights on horseback, robots and warrior queens. And, fortunately, people continued to write the types of stories that kept him in business.
Although, recently, his work had taken on a slightly different tone, to put it mildly.
He stood in the "doorway" to his studio, an opening in the drapes that hung from the ceiling, enclosing a section of the loft where he lived. Leaning against the wall across the room was the largest piece of art—three feet wide by five feet tall—he had ever attempted to create. His gaze traveled across the unfinished painting: The cloud-covered sky occupying the upper third of the canvas... The blue-black waves serving as the border between sky and ocean depths... The outline of the head rising above the waves like a volcanic island... The tentacles reaching down into those stygian depths...
And the eye.
The lone, cyclopean eye set into the middle of the head, wide and baleful, the portal to an ancient, alien, unknowable soul.
What the hell was I thinking? he wondered, and not for the first
time, while staring at this creation of his. It was so unlike anything he had ever attempted before. Disturbing. Monstrous. He had no idea where he’d found the inspiration for this particular image, had been surprised and more than a little unsettled when it had appeared, fully formed within the gallery of his mind. Adding to his unease had been the compulsion to see the image brought forth into the world outside his head. Any negative emotions evaporated, however, once he’d stood before the canvas and found himself caught up in the all-consuming act of creation.
He approached the painting, brushed his fingertips over the waves, felt the gentle bumps and whorls of the dried paint along with a tremor of fear and excitement at what the storm—what else could it have been?—had inspired in him.
A few more days...
Sure, he could finish sooner but, despite the desire to complete the project, to see the image in all its glorious detail, he didn't want to rush the process. He wanted this one to be just right. No, he needed it to be just right. Anything less than what he perceived as perfection would feel like a failure on his part.
Hell, I’m not even getting paid for it. What makes this one so important?
He didn’t know. It was a feeling, nothing more, one that would not be denied.
He glanced at the jars of paint sitting on a nearby shelf, thought of the colors he would use to achieve certain effects, what tones would bring the painting to life.
A gust of wind drew his attention to the room's lone window, to the rain and the darkness beyond. The storm had been weakening in recent days. Was it in its death throes? Would it soon dissipate? Recent news reports had been less than certain as to how long local residents could expect the "freak weather system" to stick around at this point.
