Whispers From The Dark

by Bryan Hall

  His house was twenty minutes from town and only three other homes were on the road. He’d noticed a few joggers that used the looping road for their morning runs, but this stack of rocks hadn’t been here a few hours ago, when he’d last stepped onto the deck for some fresh air.

  Paul considered it for a moment, and finally wrote it off to kids playing some odd prank. Who else would bother with balancing a bunch of stones in his lawn? He hadn’t yet met any of his neighbors; most likely one of them had a child or two who had nothing better to do.

  Satisfied with his assumption, Paul kicked over the rocks and returned to the house.

  ***

  The next morning Paul woke to a heavy rain, the drops falling against the metal roof forming a thunder all its own. He spent several minutes lying in bed, staring up at the roof and listening to the downpour. He thought of Carla, and the shitheel she’d left him for, Steve.

  She’d downgraded for sure, Paul thought with a smile. A year and a half ago she’d been married to one of the brightest up-and-coming new artists in the music industry--now she was sleeping in a shitty apartment with a building contractor. The constant touring that had garnered Paul so much success, coupled with his fondness for a bottle, were her reasons for leaving.

  I never see you, and when I do you’re a drunk asshole. Those had been the exact words that opened the letter Paul had found when he came home from his last tour.

  And for some reason she hadn’t even wanted any of Paul’s money when they’d separated. “Stay the hell away from me,” she’d told him. It was the last thing she’d said to him that hadn’t been relayed through a lawyer.

  It had hurt him, for sure. But now that he was isolated in the country, he was turning that hurt into a gold record. He'd bought the house for an insanely low price – the previous homeowners had simply stopped making the mortgage payments and disappeared into the great American landscape, running from the housing crisis, their home, and their creditors, or at least that's what the realtor had told him. The bank was as happy to unload the property as he was to purchase it. His assistant had done well for him, and he figured that he probably owed her a bit of a bonus just based on how things were turning out. He chuckled and climbed out of bed, not bothering to even put on clothes as he made his way to the kitchen and fried a plate full of bacon and eggs for breakfast. He washed it down with a small glass of orange juice, and then washed that down with a scotch.

  He walked to the glass doors that opened onto the deck and stared out into the weather. The rain had brought with it a fog so dense that he couldn’t see past the handrails. Pouring another drink, he headed back into the bedroom he’d turned into a studio and spent the rest of the day refining the songs he’d written.

  The rain persisted through the night, its drumming on the roof lulling him into a dreamless sleep.

  When he woke, the weather had cleared. Paul finished his breakfast and poured the last of his scotch into a glass, taking it onto the porch to drink.

  As he reached the handrails, he froze. Three pillars dotted his lawn, one in the same spot as the one he’d found earlier, the other two closer in to his house and sitting four or five feet from one another. He hurried back into the house and pulled on a pair of pants and shoes, and then ran outside to the rocks.

  The columns were taller now; they came up to his knees. Each one was stacked with seven polished river stones, some of them the size of a shoebox. One of the pillars seemed to be impossibly balanced; the center stone was turned up on its edge, the ones above and below it laid flatways.

  Paul stared at the creations, no longer certain that they were the work of bored kids. These had been built during the rain, or shortly after it had stopped sometime in the early morning hours. That fact alone meant it was someone with dedication; a kid wouldn’t take the time to brave through a downpour or wake at three a.m. just to carry rocks to his yard and stack them up like this.

  Paul spent the next fifteen minutes carrying the stones to the other side of the gravel road and pitching them into the drainage ditch, pondering over what motivation someone would have for building the pillars on his lawn.

  The job done, he returned to the house and jumped into the shower, hoping that the water would wash away the unease that had crept over him as he cleared the rocks from his land.

  Instead, it brought a new realization into his mind.

  What if it was a stalker? Some crazy fan trying to proclaim their love for his rock and roll songs with a weird-ass display of balancing prowess? Stranger things had happened, for sure.

  While he was famous compared to most, he wasn’t an international superstar; it was only occasionally that he was even recognized when he went out in public. He’d never had the need for private bodyguards or elaborate security measures, just a simple alarm system installed in his homes and a couple of loaded handguns at the ready.

  But still, it was as likely an explanation as kids playing a practical joke.

  Paul shuddered and turned off the shower. He needed a drink.

  ***

  The drive into town took twenty minutes, and by the time that he had left the gravel road and began following the highway Paul had managed to somewhat take his mind off of the strange rocks.

  Ashton was small, but not like the tiny two-block sort of town usually on movies and television. There was a Wal-Mart and Best Buy, a dozen or so fast food joints lining a two mile strip of road. Just on the edge of town was a small college sporting a few thousand students. A mile outside of the town the wilderness began to swallow up civilization again; homes were tucked into the mountains along hundreds of back roads.

  After the liquor store, Paul stopped by the local grocery store. He’d been living on frozen pizza and microwavable meals since moving into the house, and was ready to stock his kitchen properly and make himself a real dinner. Nobody in the store seemed to recognize him at all, and he had his cart filled within thirty minutes.

  “Can I ask you a weird question?” Paul asked the young girl ringing up his groceries.

  “Sure,” she smiled.

  “I’ve been finding stacks of rocks on my property the last couple of days. Is that a normal thing around here?”

  The girl chuckled. “I’ve seen that down by the river a lot. I always assumed it was college kids. I think maybe it’s a hippie thing or something.”

  “A hippie thing?”

  “Getting back in touch with mother earth or some crap like that, I guess. I’ve never really thought much about it.”

  Paul considered her answer for a moment before finally wondering aloud: “Why the hell would a college kid stack a bunch of rocks up on my lawn?”

  She shrugged. “Why the hell would a college kid stack a bunch of rocks up anywhere?”

  As he drove home, Paul stopped at a small gravel pull off area that overlooked the river. Just as the girl had said, Paul counted a half dozen rock pillars stacked along the riverbank. They were smaller than the ones he’d just disposed of, but otherwise were identical. One was even stacked up in the middle of the water, perched on a large flat stone that rose up above the river.

  It made Paul feel better. He still didn’t know why someone was bothering to stack them on his property, but at least he knew that it wasn’t just being done at his house.

  When Paul arrived home there were two of the pillars in the middle of his driveway. Each one was eight rocks high, made using oblong football sized stones and stacked in a more impressive fashion than any of the previous ones. Every other rock was turned edgeways, so that the pillars alternated between horizontal and vertical stones.

  He sat, staring at the structures and trying to keep calm. He wasn’t nervous anymore; now he was getting pissed. Whoever was doing it was playing games with him, mocking him. Not to mention trespassing.

  Paul drove up the driveway, smiling at the sound of his jeep knocking over the pillars beneath its advance.

  “Fucking hippies,” he grunted.

  ***

>   Paul cooked a pan seared steak and a baked potato for dinner, every few seconds leaving the kitchen to walk onto the deck and survey his property. The meal was finished just as the sun vanished behind the distant mountains and he turned on all of the exterior lights and ate at the patio table on the deck, his pistol lying beside his plate.

  When he’d finished with his meal he hurried inside and tossed the dishes into the sink, grabbed the fresh bottle of scotch and a glass, and returned to the deck. He flipped off the lights on the deck, leaving the floodlights that were attached to the corners of his house on. He pulled a chair close to the railings and poured himself a drink. The floodlights did a fair job of illuminating the lawn, although beyond their reach the dark seemed foreboding, the sounds of crickets and frogs and the glow of a million fireflies the only thing piercing its blackness.

  Paul fidgeted with the handgun for comfort, watching the lawn and sipping his scotch. After an hour or so, and a half-dozen whiskeys, an owl began to gently hoot. Paul’s mind focused on the sound, so soothing and pure, and within minutes the owl’s cries ushered him into sleep.

  ***

  Screams woke him. He jerked upwards in the chair, flinging his glass onto the deck and shattering it. He dropped the gun as well; it bounced away from him towards the deck railings, and Paul lunged forward onto his knees and managed to grab it before it skittered off the deck.

  Gun in hand, he sat staring into the darkness and listening to the screams. There were three or four distinct cries; almost like children screaming but more primal and animalistic.

  “Coyotes,” he whispered to himself. He remembered growing up and hearing his father talk about the howls of the creatures. That they sounded like women screaming in agony. Paul had never heard them before, but he hoped to God that he was now.

  Something caught the corner of his eye and Paul pulled his eyes from the darkness and looked at his patio table. Three small stacks of rocks sat evenly spaced from one another. The stones were small: the size of playing cards, but were stacked twenty high.

  Paul stood up and looked into the yard below.

  The lawn was filled with dozens of pillars of all sizes and configurations. Rocks as large as truck tires were stacked atop one another, towering twenty feet over the grass. Some of the pillars were stacked side by side with longer ones laid horizontally between them, forming a bastardized version of Stonehenge.

  The bloodcurdling screams grew louder, more cries joining in the chorus now. Panic creeping through him, Paul glanced back and forth from the lawn to the darkness.

  A shadow, stretched and distorted in the floodlights, leaped out of the darkness and sped across the lawn and disappeared into the forest on the other side. Paul choked back a scream and raised his gun. It had moved too fast to make out any details at all, even whether it was human or animal or something else entirely.

  He stood rooted to the deck, his eyes scanning the lawn, gun trembling in his hand.

  Another shadow darted across the lawn, then another, then another. A dozen of them danced across his yard, each moving in a different direction.

  A clicking sound joined in the night’s cacophony, far closer to him than the screams. It sounded like a man clucking his tongue to call a dog, only far more rapid in pace. Paul staggered backwards towards the door to the house as he realized that the clicking was coming from beneath the deck. He could see movement through the cracks of the decking boards, dimly lit by the nearby floodlights.

  He backed into the patio door and fumbled with it, finally sliding it open. As he stepped into the house a hand rose up from below the deck and gripped its edge. It was smooth and grey, fingers three times as long as a man’s and with no knuckles along their length or fingernails at their tips – like grayed, rotting hot dogs. Paul screamed and fired the gun at the hand, missing and sending splinters of decking boards flying into the air.

  As he slid the door closed behind him, another hand joined the first. A smooth dome began to pull into view, and Paul ran to the den and snatched the phone from its cradle.

  He had just finished dialing 911 when the picture window above the sofa shattered, a brick-sized stone careening onto the carpet at his feet. It was followed by a barrage as hundreds of rocks smashed through the den windows.

  Paul could hear glass smashing all over his house as the emergency operator came onto the line. “Nine-one-one dispatch. What is your emergency?”

  A head appeared in the broken window. It was long and narrow and large, yellow, lidless eyes peered in at him just above a gaping maw of a mouth on an otherwise featureless face. It seemed to grin, the corners of the mouth stretching back towards the side of the head as it placed its hellish hands on the windowsill and began to pull itself into the house. There were no teeth, no tongue, no sign of anything within the thing's mouth – it was a leering pit set into an alien skull.

  “Help me!” Paul screamed into the phone as he raised the gun and fired at the thing. The rounds struck home and the thing’s head snapped backwards, a dark mist spraying into the night as the shape collapsed.

  Paul ran for the door to the basement, grabbing its handle just as he saw something fly towards his face. He dropped to the floor with a grunt as the stone slammed into his temple, a blinding flash of pain cutting through his skull. He could feel the warm, wet blood leak from the wound and coat the side of his face.

  Trying to fight unconsciousness, Paul pulled himself to his feet, grabbed his gun, and tried for the door again. Through his blurred vision he saw dozens of gray humanoid shapes moving towards him as more slithered through the broken windows. So tall that their heads nearly touched the ceiling with long ape-like arms that almost hung to the floor, the things closed in on Paul.

  He threw open the door and stumbled through it, hurrying down the steps and trying to clear the fog from his head. The basement was dark, the only light that which was bleeding through the window on the distant door that led out onto the lawn. He could still see shadows darting around, dark flashes darting about outside.

  He had no options, he realized. He could wait in the darkness of the basement for them to come down and claim him or flee into the night and hope that they either couldn't notice him or couldn't catch him. He reached the door and peered through the small window. At the moment, he couldn't see anything outside other than the pillars of stone that littered the lawn.

  If he could make it to the jeep...

  The stairs creaked as heavy feet started down it, jolting Paul into motion.

  He opened the door and slipped out into the night. Footsteps thumped here and there, the night making it impossible to pinpoint them. He moved around the house, keeping close to the wall and trying to stay out of the floodlights as much as possible. At the corner, a set of rock steps were cut into the slope and led up into the driveway where his jeep was waiting. He hoped like hell he'd left the keys in it.

  Ten feet from the corner, one of the things shambled out of the basement door and spotted him immediately. He stifled his scream and broke into a run, barely stopping himself as another of the creatures rounded the corner and reached for him.

  Paul's footing slipped and he staggered for a few steps, rushing into the lawn.

  The shadows on the edges of the floodlights sprang to life, a dozen of the creatures moving in from the darkness. Paul took aim and fired, dropping one of them with his first shot.

  It was pure luck, and the last of his rounds all went wild thanks to his trembling hands.

  “I didn't do anything,” he screamed at them.

  He had to run. It was the only chance he had. He did so – whirling around and charging forward too suddenly to dodge the nearby stone tower. His shoulder connected with it hard and he careened off it and fell to the ground, dimly aware of the grating sound of stones shifting.

  The pillar toppled, crashing down around him. One of the larger stones landed on his left leg and he felt the bones shatter. Another rock, smaller but no less deadly, slammed into his back and
knocked the wind out of him.

  The creatures sped up their approach, their steps graceful as they moved through the pillars.

  Paul gasped for air but couldn't suck any into his lungs.

  He never managed a single scream.

  VALENCHENKO IN THE DEAD CITY

  The city was the same dismal gray as the ash that had been falling from the sky for months. Valenchenko supposed it might not always be ash – the ungodly cold certainly made a case for it being snow – but nevertheless, it was always gray.

  The whole goddamn country had been gray for almost as long as he could remember, not that he'd left Leningrad for...how long now? Seven months? Eight? – he couldn't remember anymore. The days had blurred together long ago just like the dead rotting slowly in the streets and buildings. That was the only good thing about the cold – it kept down the stink. That and that it slowed bleeding a bit if you were unlucky enough to be wounded.

  A few distant concussions rumbled through the city square, too far off to identify the exact source. Hitler's bastards had been shelling them since just after he'd arrived. He'd heard rumors that the short little fuck had plans on simply starving the city into submission, but the bombardment continued unabated.

  Starvation.

  That was certainly more effective than the artillery. The Germans were piss-poor with their aim, and only a handful died each day from the bombardment.

  But since Leningrad had been cut off from the rest of the motherland, the starvation was slowly destroying the once proud city. The Red Army had created their 'Road of Life', trying to bring in supplies and help evacuate citizens, but it was barely a road at all, and the winter was even more deadly outside the city walls than within them.

  Besides, a Russian deserter like Nikolai Valenchenko couldn't exactly escape the city with the army he'd ran from. At least in the dying city, he had a chance. A small one, to be sure, but better than being shot as a deserter.