The Darkening

by Paul Antony Jones

  Bitsy screamed again; a pain-filled screech of terror that sent a shudder of fear and anger down Frank's spine. He resolved there and then that whatever had his dog, he was going to end its miserable life, with his bare hands if he had to.

  Frank rounded the corner into the kitchen, his hand instinctively reaching for the switch to turn the light on just in time to see Bitsy's rear legs disappearing through the doggy door that led out into the backyard. Fat drops of blood left a morbid trail for him to follow from the center of the kitchen floor to the door.

  Frank ran to the back door and drew back the security bolt. He started to reach for the door handle, but stopped midway and ran back to the cutlery drawer. He pulled open the drawer, grabbed the large Chef's knife he kept in there, then turned and ran to the back door, his bare feet almost sliding out from under him as he slipped on the trail of Bitsy's blood.

  Frank simultaneously flipped the switch to the back porch light and opened the door. Stepping out onto the porch, he followed the trail of blood over the wooden deck and down the steps onto the lawn, his eyes trying to adjust to the sudden light/no-light transition. He came to an abrupt halt, freezing in his tracks just a few steps out onto the grass, as his eyes finally adjusted to the night.

  Nestled in a burr of dead grass, caught in a vague shaft of light from the porch light, sat a small, pale form. It was a kid; Frank could tell that much. A naked child, facing away from him. The child's head was dipped, exposing each knuckle of its spine against the oh-so-pale skin of the child's back. It cradled something in its arms, clutching the limp form to itself as though it was the most precious toy imaginable.

  "Caleb?" Frank recognized the boy's shock of ginger hair. It was Jenny's boy. Naked and alone out here in the darkness. How the hell did he end up out here? Frank wondered as he took another step toward the child, lowering the kitchen knife to his side as all his earlier fears about Jen and her boy suddenly became very, very real.

  "Caleb? It's Uncle Frank," he said as gently as he could, given the pounding in his chest. "What are you—?"

  The boy's head whipped around and Frank gave a startled cry of horror. Yellow, feral eyes stared out from deep pits of black, and a steady stream of blood trickled from Caleb's lips over his chest and legs.

  "Fuck... Me...," Frank whispered, as he took another step forward. If the kid was in this kind of a state, then what about his mother? Frank felt his heart sink even further.

  Caleb turned completely toward the old man, flipping suddenly like some pale bloodless reptile, both hands and feet thudding firmly onto the ground, the thing in his hands falling with a wet thump.

  "Bitsy?" Frank said, recognizing the limp body of his dachshund, blood still pouring from two puncture marks in her throat, her tongue lolling from the side of her jaws.

  "What? What?" Frank repeated as his eyes moved back and forth from the body of his dog to the child. "What?" The two images just did not make a coherent picture: Caleb, naked and blood soaked, sitting on his lawn in the middle of the night had killed his dog. Had crept into his home through the fucking doggy door. His mind simply could not process it; it kept jumping back to the moment he had stepped outside, and repeated the twenty seconds that followed over and over like the stuck needle of a record player.

  With a blood-freezing hiss, Caleb began to scramble toward Frank. The child's arms and legs—legs that until this moment had barely been able to even support the kid—propelling him with inhuman swiftness across the damp grass.

  Frank staggered backward, stumbled, one foot slipping off the edge of the steps, arms windmilling through the air. This slip, this simple twist of fate, was assuredly what saved him. As Frank fell backward, he saw the boy launch himself through the air like some kind of hybrid human-frog. Caleb passed through the space where the old man had momentarily stood, and Frank saw the boy's mouth open, exposing four needle-like teeth; two curving from the upper gums, two from below. The child's jaws snapped closed with an audible crack, barely missing Frank as he stumbled backward.

  Frank hit the ground with a jolt, mud slurping around his butt. He pressed his hands into the wet ground, they sank an inch or so as he tried to push himself to his feet, but the ground was slick with rain, and Frank's bare feet slipped from under him as he tried to pull himself up.

  Caleb came at him again, scuttling across the space between them.

  Frank instinctively kicked out with his right leg. His muddy foot connected with the boy and sent him spinning away. Frank managed to push himself to his feet. He staggered as quickly as he could back toward the house, mud clinging like concrete shoes to his bare feet.

  He rushed through the open door, slamming it behind him. He fixed the bolt into place and leaned back against the door, panting hard. This could not be possible. Caleb was some kind of... of... monster. Frank's mind, delirious with fear, tried to make some kind of sense of what he had just seen. Caleb was just a little boy; how could he possibly have—

  Something slammed hard against the door with an audible thump that shook the door in its frame.

  Frank yelped. He was not a particularly religious man, but he found himself praying silently to any god that might be listening, that this would just turn out to be a nightmare.

  The doggy door creaked between Frank's ankles and began to open.

  Frank bleated in fear, a strained, high-pitched noise that he barely recognized as coming from himself. He dropped to his knees and forced the doggy door closed. On the other side of it he heard Caleb growling and snarling like a crazed dog. He fumbled in the darkness for the doggy door's plastic lock, and pushed it into place.

  A thought, small but nagging even over his sense of disbelief and panic occurred to him: Didn't I leave the kitchen light on? Frank, his face covered in sweat, glanced around the kitchen, the darkness was almost complete, his eyes barely able to make out the shape of the countertop where he kept the phone. He needed help. 911. The cops. He climbed to his feet and began to move carefully across the kitchen toward the phone, his hands extended out in front of him like a Romero zombie.

  Frank stopped dead in his tracks, a shocked noise somewhere between a sigh and a yelp escaped from between his lips.

  Two luminous yellow orbs had appeared in the darkness in front of him.

  "What the..." he started to say but was interrupted by another voice.

  "Hello, Frank." The voice was low, husky, female, with a slight sibilance that bordered on a lisp. It took Frank a second to realize that the voice came from where the two yellow lights floated in the darkness. Another second to realize that the 'lights' were eyes. By the third second he recognized the voice as Jenny’s, Caleb's mom.

  "Oh no," he whispered, then turned and ran blindly toward the doorway leading back to his bedroom. If he could just get to the bedroom, he could barricade the door, and there was another landline there. He just needed to—

  It was the damn kitchen table that did him in, Frank decided a second after he collided with it and went skidding across the tiled floor. His head cracked against something hard as he slipped. One of the chairs, his mind told him as he lay dazed, face down against the floor. He tasted blood in his mouth, and something warm was trickling down the back of his head.

  Frank tried to push himself to his feet, but he couldn't move. He felt weight against the small of his back, pinning him to the cold floor. Hands, impossibly strong, grabbed his shoulders. He was flipped roughly onto his back as if he weighed absolutely nothing.

  Frank let out a shriek of horror. Kneeling over him, her face just inches from his, was Jenny. Her terrible inhuman eyes glowed coldly in the darkness, a thick stream of dark saliva dripped from the corner of her mouth, splattering against his cheek. She smelled faintly of decay.

  "Oh, Frank, you didn't think I'd leave you behind, did you?" Jenny cooed. Her voice sounded almost the same, but there was something different he could not quite identify. It sounded... off. Like something good that had been left to spoil.

  "Jen
ny, please," he whispered.

  Jenny did not answer him. Instead she lowered her head to Frank's neck and bit deeply into the flesh of his throat.

  Frank tried to scream but the sudden shock of Jenny's fangs slicing into his jugular vein paralyzed his tongue. He tried to roll her off him but this ridiculous waif of a girl somehow had him pinned firmly to the ground. He felt his blood leaving his body, drained from him by the creature that suckled at his throat. His heart thumped and thumped, faster and faster as he gasped in pain.

  Then a greater pain exploded in his chest, like lightning, racing through his body. Frank's back arched and his teeth clenched tightly together as his heart finally gave out.

  Mercifully, the heart attack swept Frank Schwartz away on a tidal wave of pain to be with his Laura, but the creature that had once been Jenny continued to drink from him until she could drink no more.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A scream snatched Tyreese from sleep. He sat bolt upright in bed, the comforter scrunched up just below his chest, instantly alert. The scream had not been his, he realized after a few seconds. Wasn't a dream either. Not tonight, at least.

  Tyreese looked at the alarm clock on his bedside cabinet. It was just after two am. He replayed the last few seconds through his mind: It had sounded like a child's panicked scream, or maybe a woman. It hadn't come from anywhere within his apartment building, he was pretty sure of that. The voice had been distant, muffled, so it most likely had come from one of the other apartment buildings that surrounded his. When you lived this close to so many families, you heard just about everything a human could do to themselves and others, over time. But this scream had been different, it had carried a note of terror to it that he had not heard in a long, long time.

  A dog barked somewhere; three short gruffs then became silent.

  Tyreese lay back in his bed and closed his eyes in the hope that sleep would be ready to reclaim him, but after a couple of minutes of staring at the inside of his eyelids he knew there was no chance of that happening. His grazed knuckles hurt and the muscles of his bruised back complained as he turned on his side trying to find a more comfortable position.

  Finally, he pushed the covers aside, and with a sigh maneuvered himself to the edge of the bed, then into his wheelchair.

  He rolled across to the fridge, pulled out the half-empty milk container and filled a mug. He nuked it in the microwave until the milk was just the right side of hot and took up his position by the window, sipping his drink slowly.

  A blanket of ugly clouds enveloped the sky, blocking all light from the moon and stars. The curve of sky above was nothing now but impenetrable black. The streets seemed somehow darker too. It was only after a few minutes of sitting, allowing his eyes to acclimate to the darkness that Tyreese noticed entire buildings along this block were completely dark, not a single light was on. He'd spent plenty of sleepless nights at this window, woken suddenly by the nightmare that was his regular nocturnal visitor, and the one constant of all those nights was that no matter what time it was, there was always someone else awake on the street, always a couple of lights on in every apartment block.

  Always!

  Now as he looked down from his window at the row of buildings stretching away into the darkness on either side of him, he counted at least four buildings that were completely dark, not even the dim glow of a lobby light on the ground floor. This block had its fair share of brown outs, but that wasn't what was happening here, he could see the orange glow of lights in the buildings on either side of the dark ones.

  The apartment was cool, but Tyreese felt a single bead of cold sweat drip from the nape of his neck and trickle down his spine. Something's just not right. He couldn't put his finger on what it was exactly, but there was something that just felt out of place. Wrong.

  He took another sip from his milk... and froze mid-swallow, the hairs on his naked arms standing up like they'd been ordered to attention.

  Directly across the street, in the shadows between one of the darkened apartment buildings and its lit neighbor, he saw movement. A shadow had detached itself from the darkness and was moving quickly across the parking lot of the blacked-out building, flitting between the few cars parked there. The shadow was indistinct, but fast—really fast. It moved with a speed and confidence that could not be expected from a human moving while surrounded by virtual darkness. The shadow stopped momentarily next to an old Lincoln that Tyreese could not remember ever seeing moved from its parking spot, merging with the gloom surrounding the derelict car. Tyreese leaned in closer, the worn armrests of his wheelchair creaking.

  Two yellow points of light appeared in the darkness beside the car. It took Tyreese several moments to realize what they were: eyes. Maybe they were reflecting some of the light from his apartment building back at him? The eyes disappeared for a second then reappeared again, as though whomever or whatever they belonged to had shifted its position, or was looking around, before reappearing again, looking back at his apartment.

  Tyreese got the distinct and disturbing impression that those luminous disk-like orbs were fixed on him. That even though he knew he was completely hidden within the darkness of his own apartment, the eyes saw him. That whatever it was down there was aware of him, was watching him closely.

  He'd seen the occasional coyote prowling the street late at night, picking through garbage cans looking for scraps. Hell, he'd even seen a raccoon once, but Tyreese didn't get the feeling this was either of those nocturnal prowlers. This was something else, something new.

  As if it had heard his thoughts, the eyes blinked again, and then disappeared as the shadow detached itself from the car and moved quickly toward the apartment building directly across from where Tyreese sat, mesmerized.

  The shadow moved toward one of the few buildings whose lights still shone, heading toward an apartment where a window still glowed in the darkness. Tyreese followed the shadow as best he could as it moved silently toward the front of the building. The window was on the third floor, and Tyreese watched as the shadow positioned itself beneath it, pausing as if considering its next move.

  "Jesus!" Tyreese exclaimed, the mug momentarily slipping from his fingers, spilling warm milk into his lap as the shadow suddenly leaped six feet into the air... and attached itself to the apartment building's exterior wall.

  Tyreese leaned closer to the window, his heart thumping so loudly he could hear it above his suddenly panting breath. The shadow began climbing up the apartment building, a darker splotch within the lighter shadow. It climbed the way Tyreese imagined a bat or a lizard would, hand-over-hand diagonally toward the lighted window on the third floor.

  "You have got to be kidding me," he said. He rubbed his eyes, sure that what he was seeing had to be some kind of an optical illusion, that he was still half-asleep. There was no way something so large could climb the stucco exterior of the apartment building unless it had suckers... or claws.

  In Afghanistan, he'd seen a few camel spiders. Those bastards were big, eight or nine inches, and they could climb the side of your tent and even a building, but whatever he was watching move up the building's front, well, this was human sized. In fact, as it grew closer to the umbra of the light spilling from the third story window, it looked more and more like a human to Tyreese. He was just too far away to be able to see clearly. He cursed silently to himself, and wished he still had his night vision goggles.

  The shape stopped just below the sill of the apartment window. Tyreese had to squint to even be sure that it was still there. After a few seconds had passed with no movement, he began to doubt his own mind.

  Then the shadow moved again.

  A thinner shape — an arm, maybe? — reached up toward the lighted glass of the window.

  "Oh shit," Tyreese exhaled when he realized his neighbor's apartment window was open. As he watched helplessly, a hand worked its way into the gap between the window and the jamb.

  The window swung open.

  Phone, get the phone.
Call the damn cops, right now, his mind said, quite calmly considering the panic he felt. He had to call the police and let them know that someone... some thing was breaking into his neighbor's apartment. His hands reached for the rim of his chair's wheels. He was in the process of turning, his eyes never leaving the window across the street, when the shadow exploded like an arrow from a bow into the room. He saw the drapes flutter like a ripple on a lake and then be still.

  Tyreese froze mid-turn, his breath held tightly within his chest as his vision focused exclusively on that small square of orange light less than three hundred feet from where he sat. For what seemed like an eternity he waited, a silent watcher in the darkness.

  Maybe later he would admit that the reason he did not move was because he was afraid, afraid that whatever that shape was, it might really see him, might decide to come pay him a visit next. But at that moment, he would admit to feeling only a morbid fascination to see this strange event play out to its conclusion.

  The rain continued its downpour, but above its static hiss he thought he heard something, faint, and distant. A man's desperate yell of surprise, he thought. It lasted for only a second or so, indistinct above the noise of the storm. But there was no mistaking the screech of fear that followed seconds later only to abruptly and absolutely cease.

  Tyreese leaned forward in his wheelchair, his hands clutching the tips of each armrest until his still-scabbing knuckles turned white.

  There was no sign of any movement beyond his neighbor's apartment drapes. A minute passed, then another. Tyreese began to turn for the phone again then stopped. "Oh, sweet—" The words caught in Tyreese's mouth.

  Across the street, the light within his neighbor's apartment had gone out.

  SUNDAY

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Lizzie Finch was already up and preparing breakfast in the kitchen by the time her daughter rolled out of bed.