Darkness Falling

by Peter Crowther

  He heard only the faint strains of Melanie's muffled voice but it was loud enough for him to figure out what she was shouting – shouting through the door, the door with the covered peephole that allowed folks inside the station to look out and see who was standing outside.

  Hoo boy, she was shouting, or something like that.

  And something like, Am I glad to see you guys.

  Then Johnny heard Melanie shout out his own name, and he imagined the inevitable fumbling of her small and petite hands on the lock and bolt system that would undoubtedly follow – maybe was underway right now, even as Johnny struggled to his feet and made for the hatchway leading into the station.

  Just hold on there, Melanie was probably saying as she fumbled, and we'll have you inside in just a few seconds…

  As he plunged through the doorway into the blackness of the station's interior, Johnny didn't think that having Troy and Gram inside right now was a particularly good idea at all. Halfway along the corridor, when he heard a roll of loud thuds against the door, he had a sneaking suspicion that Troy and Gram didn't agree with him.

  "Mel!" he shouted at the top of his voice, suddenly realizing how good it felt to make a loud noise. "Don't open the door!"

  (20)

  Sally Davis was about to have trouble with her own door.

  Sally did not recall going to bed but she must have done because here she was slipping out of it. Outside it was pitch black.

  What had awakened her? It was certainly a noise of some kind, though Sally didn't know what. She sat on the edge of the bed and strained to hear, absently smoothing the bedspread with her hand. There was no repetition of the noise, if that was what it had been.

  She slipped silently from the bed and padded across to the door, bent down and looked through the spyhole.

  "The lights have gone out," she told the room.

  My oh my, but how interesting.

  She stood up, hand on the door handle. "Why would the lights go out?" she wondered aloud.

  Generators? one of the voices suggested.

  She took her hand away, frowned, and leaned forward again to the spyhole. She could hear a slurring sound.

  If there really was someone else, someone out there in the hallway, if she really was no longer all alone, then why did her heart feel as though it were skipping beats all the time? And why did her hand place itself firmly at her side, scrupulously avoiding that door handle?

  Sally leaned closer to the door, her head resting on the polished oak, and she squinted through the spyhole.

  The fisheye lens effect showed the corridor starting up on the left, dropping down towards her door, and then lifting up again to the right, heading for the elevators, like a smile – Sardonicus, perhaps, or the constantly laughing sociopath out of the Batman comic book.

  No, it wasn't generators that had taken the light from the corridor, turning it into a shadowy place bereft of familiarity and imbuing it with only the suggestion of edges and planes. Then, as the slurring noise grew, a dull light shone down the corridor, and in that light, for the briefest of moments before Sally withdrew her eye from the spyhole, she saw a small boy walking slowly and awkwardly along the corridor from the direction of the elevators. And the small boy was wearing gloves and sunglasses.

  Sally's hand went up immediately to her mouth, but not fast enough to prevent a small gasp breaking free. Some deep-rooted part of her told Sally that it was important for that little boy not to know she was there. Why? she whispered mentally to the voices of the child/children who lived inside her. Because, they whispered back in a cacophonous concordance of misery tinged with acceptance: He is like us. He does not truly exist.

  Sally leaned forward to the spyhole once more.

  Two things, she noticed.

  First, the boy had stopped right outside her door, the dull light bathing his left side as he stared – Sally presumed he was staring: it was difficult to know, what with the sunglasses – up at her door, his head on one side.

  "He's listening," she whispered. And sure enough, the boy's head twitched, like a cartoon version of a radar might twitch if/when it saw/sensed incoming craft.

  That was when she noticed the second thing.

  The dull light that now bathed the boy, intermittently sweeping across the other side of the corridor, up and down the wall, was coming from a luggage trolley coming down the corridor from the direction of the elevators. Standing on the trolley was a black man wearing a checkered cowboy shirt: he, too, was wearing sunglasses and gloves. He was maneuvering the trolley by working the knobs and levers on a small box attached to the front; the light, meanwhile, was coming from what appeared to be two car headlights whose wires were intertwined around the rail that ran across the top and from which guests usually hung their tuxedos and party dresses.

  Best of all, however, was the fact that the trolley was not actually on the floor, but rather floating a foot or two above it.

  Sally took a step back, raised a hand to her mouth and turned to look at the room.

  Mommy?

  A solitary slap sounded against the room door, shaking it in its frame.

  Suddenly, the opulence of the swish eighth floor suite disappeared. Instead, it now seemed little more than a very comfortable prison cell.

  Her heart was beating fast.

  A dull thud sounded from the door, around the bottom, and she guessed that the airborne trolley had come to rest right outside. Now there was another slap. And then another, this one higher up. The black man.

  Sally stepped forward, her hand stretched out towards the door chain. She took a hold of it very carefully, trying not to make a sound–

  After all, there's no reason they should know we're in here mom–

  –and then jumping at the sound of another trio of slams, two low down and the other higher. "They know we're here," Sally whispered.

  A further single crash, delivered with new intensity, made her drop the chain and it clattered against the door.

  Everything went silent.

  She leaned forward and checked the spyhole – and then wished that she hadn't. The black man was right in front of her, the boy by his side. They were looking at the little glass on the door. The black man's face was smashed in, blood running down from his forehead and nose.

  He's battering the door with his head, Sally thought, thinking the thought casually – I think it may rain today or I must remember to get the meatloaf out of the freezer – without even the vaguest hint of surprise.

  (21)

  "Back up, Geoff," Rick hissed. "For God's sake, back up right now."

  "Jerry…?"

  "It's not Jerry." Rick glanced down at the crowd in the town square. "It's not any of them."

  The people were starting to amble – there was no other word for the movement they were making: they were ambling, a slow and formless motion forward – towards the grassy slope that led up to them. He turned around and saw that Jerry Borgesson was also ambling, thrusting one leg out in front of him, swinging it around like it was stiff or something, like he couldn't bend it at the knee any more, and then, when the first foot had connected solidly with the ground, swinging the other in the same half-arc, his arms swinging by his sides. Then Jerry brought the arms up and held them out, the fingers flexing all the while like they were reaching for something.

  "It is Jerry, for God's sake," Geoff said, his voice soft so that only Geoff himself could hear, in a tone that might just as easily have said, "No, it's not a lump… it must just be a bruise or something," while he was inspecting his balls in the shower.

  "Geoff, back up. Now!"

  Rick was standing now, torn between retreating into the bushes and reaching out for his brother's arm. Jerry came on, stumbling a little, but apparently determined. Rick shot another glance down into the town square and saw that several folks were already making their way up the grassy hillside towards the road. None of them was speaking. Nobody was making any sound of exertion. There were no calls of Let
's get 'em, men! or What are those guys doing up there watching us! – only a strange and silent relentless movement towards them.

  Geoff stepped back and held out his hands. "Jerry, it's me… Geoff."

  "Geoff, we have to get back to the station."

  "Jerry, talk to me for Chrissakes."

  The thing that looked like Jerry Borgesson lifted its arms woodenly and slowly began to remove the gloves without stopping its ambling movement towards Geoff.

  "Geoff, we have to get back to Mel."

  Cynthia Crasznow's head appeared to the side of the road, her arm reaching out a gloved hand to grasp at tufts of weed and branches in an effort to pull herself up another few feet. She keeled over to one side, no expression on her face, and lay there for a few seconds, waving her arms and legs like a turtle that had been turned over on its back. Then she managed to right herself and shifted around to get a better grip. She was wearing the same dark glasses as Jerry Borgesson. And the same gloves, dark and skintight, but thick, making her hands look out of proportion to the rest of her body.

  Over behind the filling station a throaty roar let out, too guttural for a regular sedan. Whatever was making the noise, a truly anguished bellyache of a noise, was bigger than any regular automobile.

  "Geoff…"

  Geoff turned around and looked at his brother. The look said everything that Rick felt. It held a deep sadness and an almost primal fear. The sadness was for the world that had suddenly seemed to go all to hell. And the fear was of something that was completely unknown and unfathomable.

  Jerry pulled off one glove and dropped it to the ground. The second one followed. Then the arms stretched out again, reaching for Geoff's back.

  Without stopping to think, Rick leapt forward, stumbling on a tuft and completely losing balance, pinwheeling his arms like he was going to take off and fly up into the night. A sharp pain hit Rick's side and he rolled over, grunting in pain. As he started to pull himself to his feet, Rick saw Geoff start to turn.

  But it was a microsecond too late.

  Rick watched as Jerry Borgesson's hands took hold of his brother's head, one hand at each side, holding it almost tenderly, like it was an overripe pumpkin that Jerry didn't want to squeeze too hard.

  As Cynthia Crasznow lifted to her full height and started tugging at her own gloves, pushing her feet one in front of the other through the thick grass, and as Gram Kramer's pickup tow truck appeared over Main Street and began a slow slide over to the left, towards the radio station, Geoff Grisham threw his arms forward and opened his eyes and mouth wide.

  "Riiiiiii–"

  Rick got to his knees and looked around. He found a thick gnarled branch and lifted it with both hands, lurching forward in a variation on Chuck Berry's famed duckwalk and, pulling himself upright at the last second, took a swing that would have shamed Yogi Berra. The branch hit Jerry Borgesson on the side of his head and Geoff could have sworn he heard something crack. As Rick's arms reached their full extent, he drew the branch back into view, fully expecting to find it had shattered. But it was still whole. The crack had been something else, something from inside Jerry Borgesson's head, but whatever it had been didn't seem to be causing Jerry any problems.

  Jerry continued to hold Geoff's head, and Geoff's eyes rolled upwards, showing white. His entire body was shaking, like he had his fingers jammed into a wall socket, soaking up a few thousand volts.

  Rick took another swing, this time catching Jerry full in the face, and jumped sideways, shoulder-charging his brother. Jerry stumbled backwards, his face suddenly dark and wet, letting go of Geoff's head but his arms still stretched out. Geoff slumped to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

  But the damage was done.

  Geoff's right eye slid back into view and Rick saw it catch his own.

  In that brief instant, Rick felt as though he was looking into his brother's soul. The expression told him to get away, to get away as fast as he could, and to look after Geoff's wife and keep her safe. But there was also pain in there, a lot of pain. Rick could feel it in his own head, could feel it shriveling his insides, turning them to mush. Then the expression faded and, as though on autopilot, Geoff shuffled around on the floor, trying to get up.

  Rick didn't think there was any real understanding in Geoff's mind at that point, just a simple reflex mechanism. He'd heard of it before, read about it in books about the war in Vietnam, people fatally wounded pulling their exposed intestines together and trying to stuff them back through their ruined shirts and into their stomach or bending down to retrieve limbs blown off by mortar shell or landmines.

  He'd seen a bird doing the very same thing one time, back in the house in Providence when he was just a kid. A cat had got the bird, a big white cat that he had used to like stroking and listening to it purr. The cat had torn off one of the bird's wings and gouged a big chunk out of the side of its face, just next to the tiny beak. For what seemed like an age, the bird had shuffled around on the spot – watched quietly by the cat lying right next to it on the lawn – lifting its one good wing and trying to flap the exposed muscle of the other, just going through the motions as it tried to get back to normal, slumping as its legs kept giving way first to one side and then the other. Meanwhile, all of the bird's systems were mercifully closing down.

  Rick figured that his brother's systems were being closed down in exactly the same way, the little men inside his body turning off all the power, all the screens, watching them go blank and flatlining one by one.

  Then Geoff's eye plopped out onto his cheek like the crazy glasses you could buy in joke stores, and a thick dark substance oozed out after it. He lifted a hand to his face and patted the gunk gently, then shuddered. He moved his hand away and rested it on the ground, seemingly trying to get his breath.

  As Rick watched, Cynthia Crasznow stumbled towards him, closing the ten yards that separated them.

  Meanwhile, Jerry Borgesson shuffled into a sitting position. The dark glasses were gone, knocked off into the long grass. He started to lever himself up onto his knees, one arm waving around in front of him as though he was blind, the fingers on the hand constantly grasping.

  Geoff projectile-vomited over his own legs, a long string of something solid-looking hanging from his mouth. He paused for a second, ignoring what was dangling from his mouth – and still bubbling in waves – while he patted his face again, sticking a finger patterned with leaf and grass shards into the empty eye socket. He suddenly shuddered uncontrollably and his other eye dropped onto his lap. More ooze followed and Geoff slowly lay back on the ground.

  Ed Donahue stepped from around a thick tree trunk, having climbed up from the road. Next to Ed were little Janie Sullivan and Marcy Culpepper, two little blonde girls of around ten years old that Melanie had said would be breaking a lot of hearts in just a few short years. All of them were wearing dark glasses and gloves, although Marcy and Ed were already beginning to remove them.

  Rick got to his feet and swung the branch at Cynthia Crasznow, catching her in the chest on the second attempt. Cynthia faltered, took an involuntary step backwards and then lifted her foot to move forward again. Rick brought the branch down on the top of the woman's head and brought her to her knees. One final blow sent her face forward onto the grass.

  He took a final look at his brother, the vomit still pulsing from the mouth like a well, and it was vomit that no man had any right throwing up. It didn't look like the usual stuff – carrots, corn kernels, that sort of thing, all held together in a gelatinous brown wash. This vomit looked like stuff that a man really couldn't afford to be without – gray, concertinaed tubing and tubular valves dripping with viscous fluid, all of it steaming as it lay on Geoff's chest.

  Rick turned around in time to see Jerry get to his feet. His eyes narrowed and, swinging his club-branch behind his head, he took two steps and brought it round into the side of Jerry's head. The head snapped sideways and flopped over, the ear torn off and a thick chasm opened up from Jerry's jaw
bone right the way to his eyebrow. Even as Jerry was falling, the branch came down one more, this time in the opposite direction, and caught Jerry full in the face. He went back and down, and didn't move.

  Marcy Culpepper had managed to remove her gloves and was daintily stepping around Geoff to get to Rick, her arms outstretched.

  Behind her came Ed Donahue and Janie, and behind them came other shadowy figures just appearing over the rise, all of them wearing dark glasses, all of their faces expressionless, and all of their arms held out in front of them. Rick felt a wave of panic when he saw that a lot of them had already removed their gloves.

  He turned and plunged into the thick bushes and branches, heading away from town and the road that led back to the station. There was a ravine somewhere up ahead, and the trees got so thick it wouldn't be possible for a man to break through them – at least not without a lot of effort. Rick was confident that he would have the energy when the need arose but he wasn't too sure about the time it would take to do the job.