Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1)

by Justine Sebastian

  What was uncommon was how reluctant Josephine was to get out of bed to go greet her new guest. She said she had a bad feeling about it; her skin was crawling and she had goose pimples all over. That reluctance turned into fear when she heard light scratching at the side of her house. Josephine’s house was near the river and the low-lying area was prone to flooding. Because of that, Josephine’s house sat eight feet off the ground. Whatever it was out there whimpering for attention was big enough it could reach at least the edge of the house and scratch at it.

  “I was so gosh-damned scared,” Josephine had confided in Nancy the next day. “That was one of the scariest moments in all my life.”

  Nancy had touched her friend’s arm and felt the way she trembled lightly, her skin prickled with gooseflesh.

  “That’s awful,” Nancy said. “What a nasty trick for someone to play.”

  “That’s not the worst part,” Josephine said.

  “What else happened, Jo?”

  “It went under the house,” Josephine said. “It went under there and scratched at the floorboards for… for hours, but it probably only felt that way to me ‘cause I was so scared. But it was there long enough. It went right up under where my bed sits and Nancy—I could hear it breathing. It was making these chuffing sounds that I swear to Jesus sounded almost like laughter. Like it knew I was in there scared outta my head and it was laughing at me for it. I went out the next day once I’d worked my nerve up and looked. There were claw marks on the beams under the house. Goddamn claw marks. What kind of animal would do such a thing?”

  “The human kind,” Nancy had said.

  Josephine shook her head and said, “No, I don’t think it was.”

  “Come on, Jo, no animal would do something like that,” Nancy said.

  “I still don’t think it was a person,” Josephine said.

  “Then what was it?” Nancy asked.

  “The dad-damned bogeyman,” Josephine had said. The way she looked at Nancy with her brown eyes big and wet and afraid told Nancy that Josephine truly believed that.

  Two nights later, something got into the corral behind her barn and killed six goats she’d just acquired and had penned there for the night. They’d been there pending a veterinarian’s examination to make sure they were healthy enough to be housed with the other animals at night. Josephine hadn’t taken on any new animals since that night. She told Nancy she had heard the goats screaming. She’d said when the ruckus had quieted down again, when she knew all those poor little goats were dead, she had heard that same chuffing sound. Josephine said that the weirdest part was that the gate had been wide open, like whatever it was had reached over the top and unlatched it.

  After the awful slaughter of Josephine’s goats, Mr. E.O. Fussell woke one night to the sound of his chickens in an uproarious panic. He dozed back off, courtesy of all the bourbon he’d consumed earlier that evening, but the next morning he’d woken up awakened to find the door ripped off his chicken coop and all of his chickens dead. He said about half of them were missing, too, but he couldn’t quite be sure since there were so many strewn body parts. It was difficult to put that kind of mess together well enough to come up with an accurate number.

  Things didn’t happen every night or even every week, but in the beginning, they did occur with more frequency. It felt like whatever had moved into their neck of the woods was setting up shop, saying, “Howdy, neighbors!” It was making itself known and marking its territory.

  After the chickens came one of those lulls, the countryside once again quiet at night but for the peeps and chirring of crickets. Dogs barked, coyotes cackled, once in a while, a horse would neigh. They were normal sounds, sounds that anyone that lived in the country knew and took comfort from because those sounds meant they were home.

  Then came a night in the first week of October. The lull broke with the Turners’ dog, Pancake; a big yellow Labrador as sweet a dog as anybody would ever want to meet. It was a story that Nancy heard first secondhand then again from Melinda Turner herself.

  That night in October was the first real cool snap the south had seen in months. People were outside more, breathing in the fresh air instead of air conditioning. The leaves were slow to turn so far south, but there were promising hints of gold on the oak leaves, a blush of bright red on the leaves of the soak trees. The three Turner children had been outside playing with Pancake all day and when evening fell with the quickness of oncoming fall, they’d gone inside. No one had heard much of anything from the wicked trespasser lately, but they hadn’t put it from their minds yet either. Kids were not allowed to play outside after dark, doors were locked and curtains were drawn. People arriving home after dark parked close to their porches so they could scoot inside as quick as possible. Barn doors were barred against the violent possibilities lurking near the tree line of the imagination where it mingled with the reality of what had been going on since late summer.

  Pets were brought inside. Usually.

  That night, the Turner children forgot their beloved friend, Pancake. They would have probably remembered him later if not for the youngest child having an epileptic seizure at the dinner table. It wasn’t new, but it never stopped being alarming. After that, the family was preoccupied, everyone more interested in keeping an eye on little Angela than they were about where Pancake was. No one even thought about it until they had been in bed for hours and the dog started barking.

  Pancake didn’t bark much because Pancake seldom ever saw anything to worry about. He was the kind of dog that never met a stranger, only new friends and playmates. He was the worst watchdog imaginable, but he was great with the kids and the whole family loved him. He was dumb, but he tried his best to please them all anyway even if he didn’t understand what was being asked of him when told to sit or to stop humping the armchair.

  He sounded like a hell hound that night though, barks so loud and vicious that Melinda said it made her blood run cold. She still called to the dog and tried to get him to come inside because more than anything she was worried. She’d gone to the back door and opened it to whistle for Pancake through the screen. Something answered her with a growl like the rumble of an idling engine. She hadn’t been able to stand in the door any longer, every primitive instinct she had was screaming at her to shut it, lock it, barricade it with whatever she could find. So, she had closed the door, she had locked it and leaned her own considerable weight against it.

  Pancake’s barking became frantic, grew to a growl-strangled pitch. The thing in the darkness had snarled finally, like its patience was at an end, like it had just plain had enough of Pancake’s foolishness. Melinda said she’d nearly wet herself when she’d heard it move through the yard, had heard Pancake—dumb, sweet Pancake—rush to greet it. There had been a yelp and then a snarl. Then the dog had screamed in agony and the sounds of the struggle had gone into the woods with a crash, a vicious snarl and another sharp scream from the dog.

  Melinda knew Pancake was gone then, knew it right down in the bottom of her thundering heart. She’d leaned back against the door and cried, but had been thankful to the poor damn dog for driving away whatever it was. Eventually the kids had come asking her what was wrong and she had lied to them, had gathered them to her and led them all to her big king-sized bed where they slept that night. The children hadn’t known what was going on, but they had heard enough to be so terrified that even the oldest boy at eleven had not complained about sharing a bed with his mother and siblings.

  The next morning, however, Melinda had gotten up earlier than the kids and gone to check the backyard. She’d found some blood, more than she’d wanted to see, but less than she would have expected. She’d taken buckets of water and washed the grass until it was glistening and green again. Pancake had been stolen by someone; she had decided on that story the previous night. He was too stupid and friendly; someone had dog-nabbed him and absconded into the night with dear old Pancake. Her children would be sad, but she’d get them another dog, one t
hat looked just like Pancake and it would be okay. She would try with all her might to never think about how horrible his screams had been.

  After the grass was clean, Melinda went inside to start breakfast before waking the children. She told them the sad story (lie) about what had probably happened to Pancake. Little Angela had cried big crystal drop tears over the dog and the other two kids weren’t happy either, but they all left to make the walk down the long drive to the school bus stop after breakfast. Melinda had watched them go, Angela walking between the two boys, each holding one of her small, delicate hands. Her heart had swelled at the sight before she turned away to clean off the table.

  Ten minutes later, the kids had come screaming back down the driveway, her oldest son half-carrying Angela. At first Melinda thought she’d had another seizure, but what she finally got out of her middle boy was almost worse than that.

  They’d gone down the end of the drive to wait for the bus in the little shelter their father had built them the year before he died in a car accident. It was pretty fancy as far as bus shelters went; it had three walls, a roof and a long bench. The kids had walked around the shelter to take up their seats and it was there they had found Pancake’s head. It had just been sitting there, smack-dab in the center of the seat. Blood had puddled under it a little. The dog’s eyes had been open and filmy with death; his tongue had been hanging out, a pinkish blue rag of meat flecked with the dark maroon of dried blood.

  “The piece of shit put Pancake’s head where the kids would find it,” Melinda had said just before finally breaking down into tears.

  A week after Pancake’s messy demise, Nancy came home from work in the wee hours of the morning to find her door in its current state. Claw marks over an inch deep in solid oak were no laughing matter. It was even less amusing when those claw marks were so high off the ground they almost touched the ceiling of the porch. It could have broken a window or even finished knocking the door down, but it hadn’t. It had torn up her door like it had gotten annoyed and slapped at it with one big hand.

  Nick quietly listened to her give him the rundown of events while they sat in the slanting bars of mid-afternoon sunlight that came through her kitchen windows. He sipped the beer she gave him and relished the flavor; took another sip as soon as he’d swallowed and found it as good as the last one.

  Nancy tapped ash in the saucer she used for an ashtray and said, “I don’t know why it didn’t come on in the house. I wonder the same about all of us that’ve been visited by it. It doesn’t make any sense, though not much of this does. No, scratch that; none of this makes any sense.” She took a drag off her cigarette then picked Nick’s beer up for a swallow before continuing: “I catch myself thinking about it at the damnedest times. I think maybe… maybe it really is marking something, but not territory. What if it’s marking people? Like all these little things it has done are its way of saying tag, you’re it?”

  “Maybe he knocked and was aggravated when he realized you weren’t at home,” Nick said.

  Nancy laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “I’ve thought about that, too. But you know what I else I’ve thought about?”

  “What?”

  “What it would’ve done if I had been home. If I had opened the door.”

  When Nick thought about what that could’ve meant, his stomach turned. The idea of coming home to find Nancy, the only one of his relatives he was close to, the only one he could say he really loved (though he liked his aunt and uncle; her parents) dead at the hands of some psycho killer did not do his heart good. It made his heart hurt to think about it.

  “This is one sick motherfucker. The man is off the wall crazy,” Nick said. “And no one has seen him?”

  “Nope,” Nancy said. “They’re too scared to look or… I don’t really know. I don’t think I’d want to see it. I am curious though if anyone has. Maybe they have and maybe they’re just too freaked out to come forward or too afraid they’ll be made fun of.”

  “If they saw the guy then they could give a description to the fucking cops and maybe then they’d catch him and he’d stop.”

  Nick was no fan of cops, not even close, but someone going around terrorizing people was something else he wasn’t a fan of. All signs pointed to the guy being violent and intelligent. Nick was no psychology expert, but he knew enough to know that people that did the kinds of things this guy was doing tended to escalate. Once such people escalated, especially those who were so clearly sadistic, they killed people. One of those people could be Nancy and that scared the hell out of Nick.

  Nancy’s smile was thin as a sliver of glass and just as brittle-sharp. “You keep saying ‘he’ and ‘guy’ and ‘man’.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “What else am I supposed to call him?”

  “It’s not a man, Nicky,” she said. “I thought so at first, but I don’t anymore. Not even a little bit.”

  Nick snorted. “It’s not an animal either,” he said. He smiled faintly and looked at her down the length of his beer bottle as he lifted it for a swallow. “An animal wouldn’t do the kinds of things you’re talking about. A man though—a man would do exactly that kind of insane, hateful, cruel shit. In case you haven’t noticed, human beings are assholes.”

  The silence stretched out between them. Nancy stared at the wall over Nick’s head. He watched her watching nothing as he curled his toes inside his boots; felt the gentle throb of his sore feet and the soft cushion of the band-aids wrapped around three of his toes to cover the blisters there.

  “Someone followed me,” Nick said. “All the way to the end of your driveway. I heard him come out of the woods behind me, but I didn’t turn to look.”

  He didn’t tell her why he didn’t look though. He hadn’t looked because he’d been certain that if he did, that would be when the guy tracking him decided playtime was over and went in for the kill. Nick thought he very well might have escaped being the local psycho’s first human victim. It made his insides feel shaky.

  “Good Christ,” Nancy said. She finally looked at him, expression stricken with worry. “Now do you see why I was so upset you had walked all the way here? Oh, my God, Nick. It could have killed you.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t,” Nick said. He made sure he sounded more confident about that than he felt. He regretted saying anything; didn’t know why he had in the first place, but he saw no point in worrying Nancy even more.

  “No,” Nancy said slowly, voice soft and oddly hollow. “No it didn’t. But it’s got your scent now. It’s got all our scents.” She swallowed and looked back at the wall, tracking the sun as it set in the length and color of the stripes of light. “It scares the fucking hell out of me.”

  It should have been funny to Nick, the idea of some crazy forest hermit-drifter having their scents, but it wasn’t. He told himself to laugh it off, but he couldn’t. Because it was too goddamn bizarre. It was all too goddamn bizarre, but then again, it was Sparrow Falls and bizarre was the word where the town and surrounding area was concerned.

  “It’s not an it,” Nick said. “Listen to me, Nance, no animal can do that.”

  “That one can,” Nancy said. “Because it sure as hell ain’t no man.”

  “Then what is it, huh?” Nick said. “Some bogeyman like Josephine says? Some dread man-beast come to turn us all into pulled long-pig sandwiches at its monster barbecue?”

  Nancy smiled again, the expression still thin, but there was genuine amusement there. “Maybe.” She opened her mouth like she was about to say more, but then she glanced over at the microwave clock. “Shit,” she said and stood up.

  “What is it?” Nick asked.

  “I’ve got to get ready for work,” she said. “I have sat here jawing with you for so damn long I’m still probably going to be late. Come on, Nicky, let’s get you settled in at the trailer. I’ll come by in the morning if you feel up for the company.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be ready to hear all the juicy gossip,” Nick said.

&nb
sp; He had been forced into the mold of a day person for ten years, but the truth of his nature had rapidly reasserted itself once he was no longer incarcerated. He’d take to sleeping the day away again like he’d never stopped. Sometimes he still woke, just like he had for years, ready to roll out for bed-check; his internal alarm conditioned to doing so, but he was learning to go back to sleep, too.

  Nancy led him out to the garage a few hundred yards back from the house. Nick followed her, wondering where they were going since her small pickup truck was parked in the front. When she opened the garage though, he understood. It was their grandfather’s old blue-and-white Chevrolet truck. It was a 1970s model, but it had been well cared for and passed down to Nancy’s dad who had continued to take care of it right on until he passed the truck on to her.

  “It’s all yours for as long as you need it if you swear to me on your mortal soul that you’ll take care of it,” Nancy said.

  “You have my word,” Nick said.

  Nancy handed him the keys. “You remember where the place is, huh?”

  “I haven’t been there in… forever… but I still know how to find it,” Nick said,

  “Good. I’d love to go up there with you, but I’ve really got to get a move on for work. I went out yesterday before I left and opened the windows to air the place out for you,” Nancy said. “The keys are already on the ring, so is a key to my place. There’s no satellite out there, but there’s a Blu-ray player and some movies I thought you’d like. You want more, just come on up here and get them. I got you a few groceries, too, milk, TV dinners, a couple pizzas… a twelve pack of Bud. Cereal. You know, staples.”