Reaping the Dark

by Gary McMahon

  “How secure is this place?” He looks at McKenzie.

  McKenzie is standing slowly, awkwardly, and using a wooden barrel to pull himself up onto his feet. “Safe enough. I scoped it out weeks ago. It would take three men half an hour to kick down those doors…but that thing isn’t a man.” He winces, visibly in pain.

  “Watch him,” says Clarke, touching Martha’s arm. “I just want to check this out. He jogs towards the steps and climbs them to the mezzanine level. The steps are flimsy and unstable; the handrail is coming away from the wall. He reaches the mesh floor above and makes his way towards one of the windows that break up the elevation along this side of the warehouse. They are small and high, with wire coverings on the outside; he doubts that anything other than a monkey could climb up and gain entry through them.

  He glances back down at Martha. She’s pointing the shotgun at McKenzie’s head but staying out of reach in case he makes a grab for her. Clever girl.

  Lowering his gun, he approaches the window. There are footholds running along the base of the wall just above the level of the mezzanine floor. He steps up onto the nearest footholds and peers outside. From this angle, his view is limited, but he can see down to the ground. Shadows stir; the trees and bushes twitch. There’s no sign of the thing he only half-glimpsed earlier, when it attacked them on their way to the warehouse. He peers across the burned-out shells of caravans, looking through the gaps, trying to make out if anything is hiding inside one of the vehicles or crouching behind a charred wall.

  He cannot see a thing.

  Then something catches his attention. Farther along the pathway they followed from the gate, he sees movement. Something is skipping across the caravan roofs, jumping the gaps, moving from roof to roof and making a circuit of the disused trailer park. He watches as it moves across the curved roofs, denting them upon impact, the sound like distant fireworks.

  It’s tall; much taller than a man. And its arms are overlong, the claws on the ends of its massive hands almost scraping the tops of the roofs as it leaps from one to another. Its shaggy head is huge—again, he’s put in mind of a lion, but a grubby one, half-mad and starved to the point of bloodlust. As it drifts across the distant moon, its outline going into silhouette, Clarke makes out a few more details: a lightly furred head, muscled torso, shaggy fur on its legs. The legs themselves taper to points, like sharpened stilts, and they are jointed twice—once at knee level and again farther down, the place on a horse that would be called the fetlock. Unlike human legs, these joints bend backwards, lending a clumsy and nightmarish stance to the creature.

  Clarke feels his breath hitch in his throat. The sound is tiny, barely audible.

  But the creature stops on the roof, the dim, truncated moon still partially obscured at its back, and turns slowly towards him, as if it can hear him. Its head makes a series of strange twitching movements, and it takes Clarke a few seconds to realize that it’s sniffing the air, trying to catch their scent. Then, clearly excited, the thing starts to drum its hard, pointed feet on the caravan roof, stamping like some crazed gypsy dancer, and swinging its long, broad arms clumsily around its head.

  Throughout this performance, there is the suggestion of impermanence; for some reason Clarke senses that whatever this thing is, it won’t be here long. Just long enough to do the job. Its edges are frayed, the stitches coming undone. The form diminishes even as he watches. It is not long for this world.

  It raises its immense scraggy head and howls at the sky. Against the lighter backdrop of the pale moon, something begins to happen to its broken face—in the place where it was punctured by pellets from McKenzie’s shotgun. From where Clarke is standing, it looks as if a huge fist is pushing out of the center of its face, the fingers—way too many of them for a human hand; perhaps nine or ten—unclenching and wriggling, reaching towards the unseen stars. But then Clarke realizes that they in fact resemble short, fat tendrils; or tentacles, like those of an octopus, writhing in the chill night air, seeking sustenance of some kind.

  After a couple of seconds, the creature turns its churning, clutching features back towards him. Its feet still dance on the thin metal roof. Its hands chop wildly at the air, making wild karate shapes.

  He ducks down below the level of the window, feeling ashamed of himself for hiding yet at the same time terrified of the thing’s casual scrutiny. He feels its pitiless gaze upon him, just for a second, and in that instant everything inside him goes cold. Blood, bones, veins, offal…they all turn as cold and as hard as ice.

  When Clarke is able to raise his head again, the creature is gone. The cold, pallid moon casts him under a baleful eye; the flat black sky is motionlessness, like a velvet sheet draped across an infinite tabletop. Clarke stares at the spot where the thing was for what feels like a long time.

  “Babe? You okay up there?”

  He turns around and steps down from the foothold. His hands are shaking. They haven’t shaken like this in decades, since his first time behind the wheel during a job. That time he managed to get the shaking under control within minutes, but this time it feels like it might last a lot longer; it feels like his hands will never be steady again.

  He leans over the mezzanine handrail and raises his hand—his shaking hand. “Yeah. I’m good.”

  He heads for the steps and tries to keep his footing as he moves unsteadily down them to the ground floor. He feels his insides thawing as he moves across the floor, but not fast enough: there’s still too much ice in his veins for comfort.

  “What did yer see out there?” McKenzie is sitting with his back resting against a wooden pallet tipped up against the wall. He’s holding his thigh. His face is pale. His brow is spotted with sweat.

  “I…I’m not sure. But I can tell you this—we’re fucked. Whatever that thing is, wherever it’s escaped from, it wants us. We’re its prey.”

  “What is it? An animal escaped from a zoo or something?” Martha’s voice is high, pitched somewhere near the panic point.

  “There aren’t any zoos. Not these days.” McKenzie grins, as if he’s made a big joke.

  “It’s not an animal.” Clarke thinks about what he saw: the long, tapered double-jointed legs, the weird appendages erupting from the snout; and, strangest of all, the way the creature looked hastily assembled, like a cheap puppet or a rag doll. Impermanent, yet strong and agile…designed for a quick kill.

  Martha grabs Clarke’s forearm and spins him around to face her. He keeps the gun pointed at McKenzie.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Her eyes look too big for her head; they seem to take up most of her face. Her lips, as she speaks, are trembling slightly. It’s almost erotic; she always looks like this, he realizes, when they are about to make love.

  “Exactly what I said. It’s not an animal. Not a man, either.”

  She shakes her head. “Then what the hell is it?”

  Beats of silence. Clarke closes his eyes, shakes his cluttered head. “It’s…out there.”

  McKenzie stirs, wriggling and pressing his back harder against the wooden pallet. “And we’re in here, trapped. Just waitin’ for someone to come and find us. Maybe even those strange fucks we took the money from. We don’t stand a chance.”

  Clarke looks from McKenzie to Martha, and then back to McKenzie again. It isn’t much, this little group, but it’s all he has. A wounded man who will kill him at the first opportunity and a traumatized woman who doesn’t believe in what he’s telling them.

  His troops. His little makeshift army.

  McKenzie is right: they don’t stand a fucking chance.

  “Okay, okay…just give me a minute to think, here. There must be a way out of this.”

  McKenzie, still lying on the floor, begins to laugh. It’s soft, a wheezing chuckle, but it carries on for some time before the man starts coughing.

  “Are you finished?” Clarke walks over and then stops short. What’s the point in causing McKenzie any more pain? He needs to save his energy for the
job at hand. Focus; it’s all about focus. A familiar, treasured picture fills his mind: sunlight on leaves, boys kicking a football on manicured grass. Slowly, he begins to feel a Zen-like calm. He’s more able to cope with the situation. He steps away from McKenzie, lowers the gun.

  Outside, the creature starts to howl. They all remain silent as they listen to it walking the perimeter of the building, once again scraping its long nails along the external steel cladding.

  “Those windows?” Martha glances up at the mezzanine. “Can it get in?”

  Clarke shakes his head. “I don’t think so. They’re secure. Steel mesh on the outside. I saw the thing jumping about on top of the caravans, but I don’t think it’s athletic enough to scale a flat surface like that. There are no handholds outside; it’s all sheets of metal.

  “It’s them,” says McKenzie, breaking into the conversation. “The Order of the Darkened Veil.” He lifts his head and looks at them both. His eyes are tired; his cheeks are drawn and pale. “I thought it was just a bunch of middle-class pricks playin’ at being Satanists. You know: midnight rituals, orgies, an’ all that clichéd Dennis Wheatley shit. Turns out they were real. They summoned a demon.”

  Clarke walks back over to McKenzie and bends down, resting on his haunches. “Even if that were true, why would they set something on us? Just to get the money back? They could’ve sent in some heavies to do that.” He remembers the state of Oakes’ corpse; the weird symbols carved into his dead flesh, the sheer brutality of what was done to him.

  Satanists. Occult rites and rituals. Demons. It all makes sense…and yet, as McKenzie pointed out, it’s the stuff of cheap fiction. Hammer House of Horror, Christopher Lee and a black pointed goatee.

  “You know it’s true, don’t yer? What did you see?”

  “Oakes…I thought it was you. I thought you’d done it. They carved him up, wrote signs on his dead body…tore his face off and stuck it to the glass. A simple bullet in the head would have done the job quicker, but there was clearly some kind of method in what they did to him.”

  Rites and rituals.

  Satanic pacts.

  “You can’t be serious about this.” Martha moves towards them, coming in close. “Two hardened criminals talking about devils and demons? Come on, get real.” She starts chewing on her bottom lip. Part of her fashionably uneven blonde fringe has fallen across her eyes but she doesn’t bother moving it out of the way.

  “I don’t know, babe. All I’m sure of is that whatever the hell is out there, it isn’t human, it looks like no animal I’ve ever seen in my life, and it wants to kill us.”

  The sounds outside have stopped. It’s too quiet; the silence is setting their nerves on edge.

  “We have to stay calm,” says Clarke. “Can you walk?” He steps away from McKenzie and keeps the gun lowered. “Can you get up?”

  McKenzie nods. “I think so. I’ll try, anyway. I don’t want to die on my arse.” He levers himself upright and hobbles over towards the chair in which Martha was previously bound. He smiles at her as he sits down on the chair, a muted apology.

  “Looks like we’re a team now, eh? At least until we get out of here.” He glances at the leather bag containing the money, where Clarke left it on the floor.

  “If we do get out of here, you can take it all.” Clarke walks over to the bag, picks it up, and throws it back down at McKenzie’s feet. “I don’t want it now.”

  Martha shuffles but says nothing. She stares at him, a question in her eyes.

  “I don’t want that kind of money…it’s beyond dirty. They’ll never let us keep it, anyway, even if we walk away tonight.”

  Martha nods, understanding the danger.

  McKenzie picks up the bag and places it on his lap. “I’m willing to take my chances,” he says, stroking the bag as if it is a small dog, with one hand gripping the handle.

  Martha moves to Clarke’s side. She lowers the shotgun but keeps her eyes on McKenzie. “That thing…you said it was jumping about on the caravans?”

  Clarke glances at her. “Yeah. Dancing on the roofs, shouting at the moon…really weird stuff.”

  “So it’s agile enough to get up there, and then to skip between roofs?”

  Clarke nods.

  “So why hasn’t it at least tried to get in the windows?”

  He looks up, at the upper level. Then he returns his gaze to Martha’s face. The color is returning to her cheeks. Her eyes are shining. “What’s your point?”

  “My point,” she says, pacing and glancing around at the walls, “is that I don’t think it’s actually trying to kill us.”

  “I think you might be onto somethin’.” McKenzie starts to rise, then thinks better of it and sits back down. “You saw the size of that thing. It looked strong, like an ox. Why hasn’t it been rammin’ the doors, or tryin’ to rip ’em off their hinges. Man, its hands were massive…like shovels.” He shakes his head, slowly, blowing air out through his lips. “I think Martha’s right. It’s tryin’ to scare us.”

  Clarke runs a hand through his hair. He thinks about what they are saying, trying to pick holes in the argument, but finds that he agrees with their theory. “So it’s taunting us? Trying to lure us outside, where it can kill us more easily?”

  “No.” This time McKenzie does stand, but cautiously. He tries out his injured leg, leaning his weight on it, and winces. Then he grabs the back of the chair. “When it jumped out at us, on our way over here, it seems to me that it was announcin’ its presence. It could have killed us then, easily. We weren’t expectin’ anythin’. The size of that thing, those claws…it could have torn us apart in seconds, if that’s what it wanted.”

  “But it didn’t,” says Martha. “Because it wants something else.”

  “The money?” Clarke glances at the bag, which McKenzie has now placed on the floor beside the chair.

  “Don’t be so fuckin’ silly,” says McKenzie. “What would a demon from hell want with money?”

  Martha giggles. McKenzie smiles. Clarke shakes his head, can’t help but smile, too. It breaks the tension, taking the heat out of the moment. “Okay, okay,” he says. “That was stupid. But you get my point, yeah? What the hell else could we possibly have that it wants?”

  McKenzie stops smiling. Slowly, he turns his head and looks at Martha.

  “What?” she says, backing away and unconsciously raising the shotgun. The end of the barrel wavers.

  “Maybe,” says McKenzie, “just maybe, it likes sweet meat.” He lowers his gaze to her belly. “What if it just wants your baby?”

  Clarke feels dizzy. He doesn’t realize that he’s pointing the gun at McKenzie until he looks down at his hand.

  “Easy, tiger.” McKenzie holds up his hands, palms out. “It was just a fuckin’ suggestion.” The grin is back on his face; surly, challenging.

  Clarke realizes that there can be no alliance here, not even an uneasy one. The man is not to be trusted; he’s looking out purely for his own skin. Given the opportunity, he’d sacrifice them both in a second to guarantee his own escape. He is biding his time, playing the comrade card, and all the while his mind is racing ahead, trying to foresee the moment when he can make his move.

  “You almost had me there,” says Clarke. “Just for a moment…more than that; a few minutes. I actually thought you were human.”

  McKenzie lowers his hands and rests them on his knees. “Never trust a man with a bullet in his leg.”

  Clarke is so occupied with watching McKenzie that he fails to see Martha move until it’s too late to stop her. She walks over to the chair, swings the sawed-off, and swats McKenzie across the side of the face with the barrel. He loses his balance, tipping over and taking the chair with him. The man doesn’t cry out; he takes the hit in silence.

  Martha kicks him in the leg—the wounded one—and only then does he start to scream. She kicks him again, harder this time, and Clarke is forced to intervene. He moves quickly, grabs her by the shoulder, and pulls her backwards. When
she turns towards him, her face curled up into a snarl, he barely even recognizes her.

  Then, realizing what she’s done, Martha steps away. She turns her back on the two men and walks over towards the metal staircase, where she sits down heavily on the bottom step. The metal creaks; the flimsy stair wobbles.

  Clarke approaches McKenzie. He’s rolling on the floor, dust smearing his clothes, and whimpering. Clarke waits, allowing the man some time to endure the pain.

  “Jesus,” says McKenzie, eventually. “You might want to keep a leash on that bitch of yours.”

  Anger flashes in Clarke’s head; a single burst of flame. But it only lasts a second, and then it’s gone. He is in control; he can’t afford to go off on a rampage. “Her bite’s much worse than her bark,” he says, dragging McKenzie and the chair back into position. He rights the chair and pushes McKenzie back into it, ripping his jacket in the process.

  “Thanks…d’yer have any idea how much that cost me?” McKenzie starts taking off the jacket, using the incident to deflect attention from his previous show of weakness. Despite himself, Clarke cannot help but respect the man just a little.

  Clarke steps away and watches as McKenzie removes his torn jacket. He holds up the garment, inspecting it, and then throws it across the room. Underneath he has on a short-sleeved T-shirt. At first Clarke thinks the man’s forearms are dirty or bloodstained, but then he realizes that what he’s looking at is a dense matrix of tattoos.

  He shifts down a gear, letting his mind catch up.

  The tattoos are all black, running across McKenzie’s pale flesh. There are strange symbols, demonic faces, and looping lines of text written in a language Clarke doesn’t recognize.

  McKenzie looks up and smiles. “Protection,” he says.

  “You knew?” Clarke stares at the artwork; it’s crude, untidy, but that doesn’t matter because these tattoos aren’t fashion accessories. Nor are they prison identity badges, or gang markings. No, these tattoos have another purpose altogether.

  Protection.