His brother said nothing, just stared into the fire.
And then it dawned on him. The SUV. He’d obviously been in the Explorer. It was the only possible explanation. He’d left the door to the cabin open by accident and went looking for Christy. When he was unable to find her, rather than returning to the cabin for some reason he had sought refuge in the SUV. When the cold eventually woke them and he saw them come looking for him, he sat quietly watching them make damn fools of themselves. He’d decided to end the charade once they returned to the cabin, probably because he was well aware that their next move might be to either check the Explorer or even attempt to search for him in it. So he’d slipped from the SUV, stayed out in the storm a few minutes until he looked properly frozen, then crept to the cabin, waited by the door and probably listened to the tail end of their conversation.
But why had he done it? It wasn’t like Raymond to pull a childish prank like that. What was the point? What was he trying to prove? None of it made any sense.
“Go to bed, Seth,” Raymond said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Why don’t you take the bed and get some rest? I’ll use the sleeping bag.”
“You take it. I’m going to stay up for a while.”
Seth gave a slow nod. “We’ll talk about this in the morning.” He shuffled over to the bed and settled in, pulling the covers up tight. He tried to relax but the entire evening seemed beyond surreal and continued to prey on his nerves. The whole point of this trip had been to relax and get some time away from the office, from their jobs and the stress of their everyday lives, a long weekend in northern Maine at a cabin surrounded by miles of beautiful woodlands. They had planned nothing more than some drinking, card playing and some much needed downtime away from the hustle and bustle of the city, spent instead amidst the beauty and quiet of nature. Initially, Raymond hadn’t been part of the plan, but when he’d showed up unexpectedly, as Raymond normally did, Seth brought him along, excited at the prospect of some quality time with his brother.
“Hey, Seth?”
His thoughts interrupted, he sat up on his elbows so he could see Raymond. He was again facing the fire. “Yeah?”
“I’m sorry if I frightened you.”
“It’s all right.” Seth lay back, watched the shadow flames play along the cabin walls and the low, dark ceiling. “Just don’t do it again, OK?”
Giving in to the exhaustion, Seth drifted quickly off to sleep. As he slipped away, he could’ve sworn he heard Raymond weeping. Perhaps it was only a dream, he couldn’t be sure. Either way, though he did not revisit his nightmares of strange lightning, falling skies and whispering spirits, he nonetheless slept fitfully the remainder of the night. This time, during the brief intervals when he would come awake for a moment or two, he remembered only a deep darkness, a void. Nothing.
* * *
It was just prior to sunup when Seth felt someone gently shaking his shoulder. He came awake to see Louis crouched next to the bed, fully dressed, a single finger to his lips signaling him to be quiet. Once satisfied that Seth was awake, he motioned to the slowly dying fire.
Raymond was sound asleep in the chair. On the floor nearby, Darian was out cold in his sleeping bag.
Seth rolled out of bed and quietly followed Louis across the room to the small galley kitchenette on the far side of the cabin. Once there, Louis peered back at the others to be certain they were still asleep. He looked stressed and worn out. “There’s something wrong, Seth,” he said in a loud whisper. “Something wrong with Ray. Last night was—”
“Relax. I figured it out. He was hiding in the Explorer, that’s all. I’m not sure why he’d do that just yet, but I’m sure that’s where he was.”
“Not without the keys he wasn’t.”
“I’m not saying he started it or went anywhere, he just sat in it.”
“No Seth, he didn’t.” He reached into his jeans and pulled free a ring of keys. “I’ve had them the whole time.”
“But the doors were—”
“The doors were locked. I know, because I’m the one who locked them.” Louis blinked rapidly, forced a nervous tic of a smile and motioned to the remote alarm button on the key ring that once pressed locked all the doors in the vehicle and gave off a loud and annoying electronic wail.
In his mind Seth saw him and Raymond unloading the last of their things from the SUV just after they’d all had stew. He saw Louis walking away, the key ring held high and aimed back over his shoulder at the vehicle. The loud beep and the distinctive clunking sound of the locks engaging in unison echoed in his memories.
“Force of habit, I guess,” Louis said. “I always lock car doors. And those doors have been locked since before Ray and Christy disappeared.”
“Maybe the keys—”
“They never left my jacket pocket. I checked, thought maybe she stole our wallets.”
“Well then where did he go?”
“That’s just the thing, man. Where the hell did he go?”
“He must’ve been out there walking, like he said.”
“Seth, listen to me. No human being could survive that long out there.”
“But he did.” Seth shook his head as if to clear it of distracting thoughts. “Dumb luck, maybe? The grace of God?”
“Thought you didn’t believe in God.”
He looked away. “I believe in God, Louis,” he said quietly. “I just don’t have anything to say to Him.”
“I figure he was out in that storm thirty, maybe forty minutes. Did you hear what I said before? Nothing human could survive that long out there.”
“Stop being so melodramatic.” Seth folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against the counter. “Obviously he managed it somehow.”
“From the minute that girl came here, it—things haven’t been right. There’s something wrong, man, something wrong.”
In all the years he’d known him, Seth had never seen Louis this way. “It was a strange day and a strange night, no question.”
Louis looked unusually pale. “I’m not gonna die out here.”
“Die?” Seth laughed reflexively, but it was a nervous laugh laced with fear rather than humor. “For God’s sake, some strange things happened last night to be sure but you’re not going to die, Louis. Why would you die? Why would you even say that?”
“I don’t know, I—I can’t explain it but there’s something happening here I don’t like, it—I know it sounds stupid but last night all I could do was go to sleep even though I—I know it makes no fucking sense but I didn’t want to sleep, I was scared to sleep but I couldn’t stop it. It was like I couldn’t control it.”
Seth knew exactly what he meant but words escaped him. He could only nod.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about all this.” Louis rubbed his eyes with both hands then slid them down across his face as he released a lengthy sigh. “Real bad.”
“It was a stressful situation with Christy and all. Sometimes stress can do strange things to you, it can alter perceptions sometimes. Then on top of it we were all drinking last night too…weren’t we?”
“Yeah, but—I don’t feel the same now, I feel different.”
“Different how, Lou?”
“Like myself again, I guess.” He ran his hands over his face, up across his forehead and into his hair. “Only different.”
“There’s a reasonable explanation for what happened. There has to be. Think about it. Visibility was next to nothing out there, he could’ve been five feet from us and we would’ve never seen each other.” He stepped closer, put a hand on his shoulder. “Every-thing’s all right. OK?”
Louis nodded, but Seth could tell he didn’t believe it for a minute. And he didn’t blame him, because Seth didn’t believe it himself. Something was wrong—he could feel it in his gut—something horribly wrong, and like a virus not yet detected, it was silently growing, strengthening and devouring them from the inside out. He could feel it, an odd, dark and lonely feeling;
a quiet sense of dread.
He wished now they’d never come here, to these woods and this unassuming cabin, because they were all going to die.
Perhaps, in a way, they already had.
PART TWO: SLEEPERS
“I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”
—Sylvia Plath, ELM
CHAPTER 3
As dusk settled, the horizon loomed above the trees, an endless canvas painted with great brushstrokes of celestial blue and black. Amidst the slowly dying light, the moon sat high in the sky like a hastily hung ornament pasted above the darkened edges, and but for the beginnings of delicate snowfall, all was quiet.
He watched her a while, careful not to reveal himself too soon.
She lay on her side at the edge of the forest, her weight supported on one elbow, her face turned to the sky. The snow increased a bit, becoming a light flurry, but she seemed unaware of it, absently blinking away flake after flake while sorrowfully gazing straight ahead, seeing everything, and nothing at all.
“Where are they?” he asked softly, still concealed in the shadows behind her. When she didn’t answer he asked again, this time more forcefully. “Christy, where are they?” Like so much else here, she was familiar and foreign to him all at once. He stepped forward, allowing the moonlight to touch him. “Where are they?”
“Where do you think they are?”
“Where’s my brother, Christy? Where are the others?”
“It took them,” she said, this time looking back over her shoulder at him.
Her expression was possibly the most heartbreaking he had ever seen. “The snow?”
“The night.”
* * *
He looked out at the vast expanse of forest, felt a subtle popping sensation in his temples followed by a gradual warm trickle. Though he already knew what he’d find, he slowly raised a hand to his nose, touched a finger to his left nostril then held it away from his face so he could see. Blood. It ran along the space beneath his nose to his upper lip, seeping in and trickling along the line of his mouth. He tasted the bitter flavor in the back of his throat, swallowed and nearly gagged.
Like always, it was then that he knew he was having a nightmare, or something like a nightmare.
The screams from the far side of the forest brought him back to the dreamscape, but by then he was falling away from it all. He could feel himself hurtling, plunging downward, as if he’d mistakenly stepped into a deep pit, the light above him shrinking into the distance, swallowing more and more of it the deeper he descended.
His fall ended quietly, and in total darkness, as always. But then came light from above, as if he were lying at the bottom of a well, looking up at the opening. Only this was no well. He was on a slab of a table, strapped down, secured with what appeared to be thick brown leather-like harnesses of some kind, various old and rusted metal contraptions littered along the periphery of his vision. The screams returned, but this time they belonged to him. He struggled violently as whatever was down there with him held him in place, and together with the restraints, made escape impossible.
“Is this Hell?” he, or perhaps someone else whispered.
He could hear breathing, labored breathing.
Something brushed against him then slid onto his head, the pressure increasing as it pushed down around his forehead, nearly covering his eyes. Cold, hard and metallic, he realized one of the strange contraptions had been forcibly fitted to his head.
What—what’s happening? What are you doing to me? He wanted to speak the words but could only manage to think them while screaming incoherently.
Unseen hands began tightening rusted screws that had been fed through holes in the headpiece and positioned on either side of his skull. As his screams became whimpers, he heard the squeaking, grating sound of metal on metal. The screws closed on him, the tightening sensation in his temples growing stronger and stronger until he felt the metal puncturing the skin and pressing painfully against bone.
Why are you doing this to me?
He heard the sound of bone cracking and imploding before the pain burst through him, stabbing from his temples down into his jaw, teeth and neck. The pressure in his forehead was so severe he felt his eyes bulge and rupture in their sockets.
At the very outskirts of consciousness, he sleepily forced what remained of his eyes upward, to the opening far above him, and what little light still resided there. Through the perspiration and blood he felt something else trickling down on him in a slow steady stream. Rain? Could rain reach him down here?
His vision blurred, cleared, blurred and cleared again. A face was peering down at him, huddled over the opening. He squinted through the pain and dizziness but the face remained the same: a series of scars and open wounds in bloody raw flesh, unfinished, mutilated and tortured yet grinning like some cretin child. The being’s mouth opened and it vomited, the thick, foul fluid showering down, spattering the walls and floor around him.
And then the quiet returned, bringing with it total darkness.
Until, as always, the next phase began.
The boarding house he’d been staying at of late was a gloomy and rundown building that offered the kind of meager flophouse room he could afford while washing dishes at a nearby diner. It was a place where no one knew or cared who he was; no one asked questions, no one spoke unless they were spoken to, and the world kept on just beyond its walls, noticing nothing.
A safe place to hide, he’d thought, at least for the time being.
The detail was remarkable, the room an exact duplicate in his mind, and had he not experienced this so many times before, he’d have been fooled into believing he was actually awake. But he knew better.
Lying in bed, the springs from the worn mattress poking at him through the hopelessly thin material, he remained still but let his eyes pan slowly across the room. Near dawn, the only light was that which slipped through the sides of a pulled window shade on the far wall. But he could still see that he was not alone. A humanlike shape, perched like some giant bird of prey, sat crouched on the edge of a battered old bureau, staring down upon him with calculated silence. Nude and lacking skin, the flesh beneath gleamed red, raw and wet, networks of vein and sinewy muscle glistening as if recently glazed.
Only the lidless eyes moved, gliding slowly back and forth, all the while keeping him in their line of site. But even the eyes weren’t right. Not quite human.
Without moving from the bed Raymond raised a hand to his lips, palm up, and blew, as if blowing flower petals into the air. As his breath crossed the room and reached the sentinel on the bureau, the man—thing—disintegrated in front of him, dissolving and floating away, ash disturbed by a sudden breeze.
He watched the pieces spiral slowly downward, and sat up so he could follow their progress to the floor. But they were gone, vaporized like raindrops against hot coals.
As he continued to stare at the spot where the ashes had vanished, something else caught his attention, something small and thin and foreign along the old wooden floorboards. Cautiously, he rolled out of bed and shuffled closer to it.
He crouched, immediately realized what it was and vaulted back in horror.
A finger. A small index finger from the looks, lying there on the floor in the center of the room, gnarled as if from arthritis or some medical abnormality and yet, the finger was so tiny it appeared to belong to a child. Like the ghoul looking down on him in the pit, it appeared not quite finished, a work raw and in progress, not fully realized.
Heart racing, he crouched down again for a closer look, then glanced above him, inspected the ceiling a moment, hoping to find a spot from which it might have fallen. Several cracks traversed the aged plaster ceiling, but none were large enough to accommodate the finger. Still, he thought, it looked as if it had been dropped there from above, thrown aside like garbage.
Slowly, he reached for the fing
er.
Without warning it burst through the floorboards, splintering them with loud cracking sounds as the finger became a hand, revealing a fist and a small form attached to it. From under the floor a flood of other hands and arms vaulted up into the room, reaching, grabbing at him with their tiny fingers, ignoring his screams and dragging him under, back through the now gaping hole. Their faces and bodies concealed in the darkness beneath the floor, they growled at him, yanking him down into their lightless fissure, his body folding and breaking, bones snapping before he disappeared completely, his screams silenced as an eruption of blood and bile sprayed his throat.
* * *
This time, Raymond came awake in a bus terminal. Sitting in one of a cluster of astonishingly uncomfortable plastic chairs, his eyes focused for a moment on a little girl sitting directly across from him. He knew by the look on both her face and her mother’s that he had awakened abruptly and made something of a spectacle of himself.
The little girl was pretty and innocent, so precious. The moment he looked into her eyes he knew she was no danger to him, but Raymond waited a moment nonetheless to be sure he was awake, then ran a hand through his hair and let out a slow, steady sigh. His fingers came back sticky with perspiration.
The woman across from him put an arm around her daughter reassuringly and gave him a stern look. Raymond smiled at her, and then at the little girl. When neither responded in kind, he nodded self-consciously, grabbed the duffel bag at his feet and moved away, toward the exit.
Through the glass doors at the far end of the terminal he could see rain falling. Almost time to board, he told himself. He slung the duffel over his shoulder and strolled closer to the exit so he could get a better view of the street beyond. Plenty of cars sat parked and just waiting to be borrowed. Never did like buses much.
Deep Night Page 5
