Night People

by J L Aarne

  While they were still watching him, Wyatt leaned toward his father and looked at his face. Aaron looked pale, almost like a figure sculpted from wax. His chest only rose and fell minutely, his eyes moved beneath his lids and he held onto the edge of the bed like he was afraid of falling.

  “I was scared,” Wyatt admitted. “That phone call scared me.”

  “More than the dark?” Kat asked.

  He nodded.

  Kat sat down with him and their mother on Wyatt’s other side and took his hand. He squeezed her fingers and they looked at their father lying there seeming small and frail in his white hospital bed. There were shadows in the hospital. There was light from the lamps around them but farther from the center of the room, in the corners and crevices, it was dark. Wyatt watched for little things flitting through the deepest shadows and, not for the first time, wished he could be normal like everyone else. He wasn’t so sure the things he saw in the dark were hallucinations, but even if they were real, he would have given just about anything not to see them.

  A shadow crept up the dark wall outside his father’s room and disappeared and Wyatt pretended not to see it. Outside, the darkness pressed against the window glass seeking entry. He caught himself watching it; looking at the faintly orange glow of the parking lot lights coming through them, casting slats of light through the open blinds. The orange light made the shadow creatures outside appear sickly.

  “You’re seeing them right now, aren’t you?” Kat asked him.

  “Shh, it doesn’t matter,” Wyatt said.

  “Wyatt.”

  “Yes. I see them now. I always see them.”

  Kat swallowed thickly against the press of tears in the back of her throat and nodded. She leaned over and rested her head on Wyatt’s shoulder. “You know, you’re the bravest person I know,” she said softly.

  Wyatt let out a startled burst of laughter. “I’m not,” he said. “I’m scared of everything.”

  “I know,” Kat said.

  “I think Dad might be the bravest person I know,” Wyatt said.

  Their mother smiled, and Kat smiled, too, but she said, “He’s the second bravest person I know.”

  Chapter 2

  Wyatt went home that night, for once more afraid for his father than he was of the dark. He still dashed to his door with a flashlight, but he had left all the lights in the house on when he left, so it was bright and safe. He took a shower and thought about his mother all alone at the hospital with his father, who slept the sleep of the righteously sedated. Then he went to bed and couldn’t sleep himself. He tossed and turned and got up to check the house at least ten times, but it was still the middle of the night and he couldn’t sleep.

  Wyatt had always been like that. As an infant, he had screamed more than other children screamed when left in the cradle at night, then he would be tired all day. He was a night person, his mother used to say, because her son would sleep all day and stay up right to sunrise. The irony of him being such a person was not lost on Wyatt; a night person who was afraid of the dark.

  As a child, he hadn’t known to be afraid of all the things he saw. All he knew was that the gnomes and sprites liked to play with him and there was a monster in his closet and another one beneath the bed, but his parents couldn’t see any of them. The monster in the closet eventually went away, but the one under his bed never did. Its name was Thorn, which was a pretty badass name for a creature whose worst fear was being exiled into the word outside of the space beneath Wyatt’s bed. When he was little, Thorn had scared him, but he had outgrown that fear. Wyatt and Thorn hadn’t always talked much, but they had an understanding.

  That night as he lay there sleepless in bed with the cats balled up and purring beside him thinking about his father, he wondered if they hadn’t all downplayed it for him. If it wasn’t worse than everyone let on because Wyatt was so unstable and delicate. Aaron and Wyatt were not exceptionally close, not the way Aaron and Kat were, and he often got the impression that his father didn’t know what to think of him, that he confused him and made him sad, but he had never doubted that Aaron loved him. He couldn’t imagine what he’d do if his father died.

  If he died alone in a hospital bed in the dark.

  Wyatt shuddered and rolled over onto his stomach, balling the pillow up in the crook of his elbow. His other hand was over the edge of the mattress. After a long time trying to forget about it and go to sleep, Wyatt thought about all the things he wished he could say to his father. He muttered in soft whispers under his breath, rehearsing a conversation that would never take place, not even if Aaron made a full recovery.

  When he felt a hand touch his fingers, Wyatt didn’t jerk away. He put his hand down farther over the edge of the bed and Thorn took his hand and held it. Wyatt didn’t know what the monster living beneath his bed looked like, but the skin of his palm was soft and warm, and it wasn’t the first time he had sensed Wyatt’s mood and offered him comfort. For all he knew, Thorn looked like a ten-foot-long centipede. Oddly, he didn’t find the possibility disturbing or disgusting. Sometimes the things in the dark, even the monsters, weren’t that bad. He had learned that a long time ago, but it was hard to tell the difference between a bad one and a nice one and they didn’t write instruction manuals for Wyatt’s condition. He didn’t think there were other people with his condition, or at least he had never met one.

  He had once known a man named Jared who had a very peculiar, intimate relationship with his neighbor’s horse, a stallion named Satan. Jared had started many conversations in the waiting room of Dr. Graham’s office with, “This one time when I was fucking Satan…” It led to some awkward moments. If Jared had really been having an affair with a monster he thought was the devil, he and Wyatt might have had more to talk about, but Jared knew very well that Satan was just a horse. Wyatt had been glad when Dr. Graham told Jared that she couldn’t see him anymore.

  The things that lived in the dark were a lot like people though. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, most of them just wanted to be left alone. The trouble was knowing which one was which so you didn’t get your face unexpectedly chewed off.

  Thorn was one of the good ones.

  “I’m sorry you’re sad,” Thorn told him.

  “My dad’s sick,” Wyatt said.

  Thorn didn’t answer him, but he squeezed Wyatt’s fingers.

  “You’re a good friend,” Wyatt said. It was a strange thing to say to a creature that was probably a figment of his imagination. “You’re one of the nicest monsters I know.”

  “Yes, I often think the same thing about you,” Thorn said in his soft, far away voice.

  Wyatt fell asleep and when he woke up in the morning, he was alone and no one was holding his hand. He knew Thorn wasn’t really gone, but he wouldn’t see or hear from him again until the sun went down. Perhaps not even then. He was a solitary, reclusive creature.

  Wyatt dragged himself out of bed and into the shower. He got dressed and ready for work in his usual slow, half-asleep funk then drove to the Hill Top Diner.

  Charlie, one of the guys who worked the midnight to 8 a.m. shift, was cleaning up when Wyatt got there. Charlie was a big guy in his forties, he had type two diabetes and longish slate grey hair topped by male-pattern baldness. His skin and hair always looked oily and Wyatt would have blamed that on Charlie standing over the grill or huge vats of boiling oil all night, except Wyatt didn’t have bad skin and he did the same thing.

  “Hey, Charlie,” Wyatt said, tying an apron around his waist.

  Charlie barely glanced up from tying off the top of a garbage bag and just grunted at him by way of greeting. “Heather called in. She might be a bit late,” he said. Then he hefted the garbage bag and carried it out back.

  “Fantastic,” Wyatt said under his breath.

  Heather worked in the kitchen with him through the lunch rush and Wyatt depended on her when things got really busy. However, she was not very dependable, she was late an average of twice a w
eek. Occasionally she didn’t show up at all and he didn’t know how she hadn’t been fired, but she had been working there almost as long as Wyatt himself.

  If she was only a little late though it would be okay.

  Wyatt got to work and he almost managed to forget about his problems. He wasn’t completely awake yet and coffee didn’t help much. He functioned better at night, he just did, but living in the daylight was the only way he could hope to cling to even a scrap of his sanity. It was some kind of wicked joke that he seemed to have been born that way and cursed to live in terror of the dark. Consequently, he was like a zombie when he first got to work. People had told him that he would get used to it eventually, that his body and mind would reprogram themselves and he would be a genuine day person. He was still waiting for that to happen.

  He filled orders on autopilot. He wasn’t a bad cook, but it was all pretty much the same, day in, day out. Omelet with mushrooms and swiss, no peppers, no meat. Sausage, ham or bacon and eggs fried over easy. Hash browns, sausage, eggs scrambled. Oatmeal. As it drew closer to lunch, there was a switchover from eggs and bacon to ham and cheese on rye. Grilled cheese sandwich with tomato basil soup. Chicken strip basket with onion rings. Double bacon cheese burger with beer batter fries.

  People came in and ordered, the waitresses gave him the orders, sometimes lingering a second or two to flirt, but most of them had learned by now that it was useless. He liked men, when he noticed, which wasn’t that often.

  He took his own lunch break after 1:00 p.m. when things slowed down, and sat at the counter near the back, listening to people talk, watching the waitresses pass back and forth carrying food on trays to waiting people. A little kid at a booth toward the front was turned around in his seat watching Wyatt, his index finger up his nose.

  A man dressed all in black walked into the diner, looked around briefly, then walked over to the counter and sat down on a barstool across and slightly down from Wyatt. “What’s good here?” he asked, picking up a menu.

  Wyatt was eating a sandwich he had made at home out of leftover chicken. He shrugged. “It’s all okay,” he said.

  The man in black smiled, scanning the menu. He was older, but sexy in a lanky, lazy cat sort of way. There was a mole beside his nose, a dimple when he smiled, and his dark eyes kept darting away from the menu to scan the room before going back to it. It was strange behavior, but maybe the guy was waiting for someone, or he had some sort of PTSD. Wyatt had read that it could make a person hyperaware of their surroundings, even such mundane surroundings as the diner.

  Wyatt watched him a minute longer before he popped the last of his sandwich into his mouth and went back to work.

  The man ordered a Reuben sandwich with coffee. He ate it in ten minutes, paid and left.

  “My cousin Matt used to eat like that,” Heather remarked as the guy was leaving.

  Wyatt was clearing away the dishes. “What do you mean?”

  Heather didn’t usually have much to say to Wyatt. No more than Charlie did. Heather was a tall girl with broad shoulders and blond hair that she cut boyishly short. She was a lesbian and since Wyatt liked men he figured that was why they didn’t ever have much to talk about. Charlie was just an asshole.

  “Fast, kind of hunched over his plate like he thinks someone’s going to take it from him, eyes all over the place,” Heather said. “Except that guy didn’t really hunch. He just had this ‘I will fuck you up if you try to take my sandwich’ vibe coming off him. You know what I mean?”

  “Uh, not really,” Wyatt said. He had stopped paying attention to the man after he went back to work.

  “Well, Matty was in prison for a while,” Heather said. “Before that, he was in one of those group homes. You know the kind where they put you when your mom and dad are both locked up and they don’t know who to send you to?”

  “I guess,” Wyatt said.

  He had almost no idea what a place like that was like, but he thought he understood what she was trying to say. The strange guy ate like a dog with food aggression.

  “Weird,” Heather said.

  Wyatt went back to cleaning the grill and Heather sighed and started doing some of the prep for dinner.

  When Wyatt got off that evening he could have sworn that it was darker than the day before had been. It was still a couple of days until daylight savings ended and it was nearly dark outside when he went out to his car. As he hurried across the parking lot he told himself that he needed to take a flashlight inside with him when he got to work the next day so that he would have it when he got off. He should have taken one that morning, but he hadn’t even thought about it. His mind had been on other things.

  His old white Volvo was parked as close as he could park it to the front of the diner, but the diner was usually busy when he got there, and he wasn’t allowed to park in the very front because those spaces were for customers. It wasn’t total darkness, it was gloaming darkness, but there was about forty feet of it between the door and his car. Wyatt stood just outside the diner for a minute to let his eyes adjust. He stuffed his hands down deep in the pockets of his jacket and scanned the area for creatures hiding in the darkest shadows.

  He didn’t see anything, but just because he didn’t see it that didn’t mean it was safe. Of course, if he stood there too long it would become full dark, so in the end, Wyatt made a run for it.

  He slid a little in the gravel when he reached his car and fumbled to get the key into the door with his hands shaking, cursing his old model car for not coming with a keypad lock. He finally got the door unlocked and slammed it closed behind him.

  Only then did it occur to him to look in the back seat. He turned his gaze slowly up to the rearview mirror, his mind filled with imagined demonic faces and hideous monsters crouched there, claws at the ready.

  The back seat was empty. There was nothing in it but a balled-up paper bag from McDonald’s and a big black flashlight.

  He was going to be so glad when he could finally turn his clock back an hour. He still had three days and he had been counting them down for more than a week.

  He didn’t live in the middle of the city where all the lights were on all the time and people were always having a party somewhere or going out with friends. He would have liked to, but he wasn’t getting rich frying burgers and making sandwiches at the Hill Top and an apartment somewhere like Seattle was expensive. He maybe could have done it if he didn’t mind having a couple of roommates, but Wyatt knew how that would go. He would make them uncomfortable or they would think he was being rude, and they wouldn’t like him and eventually he would be asked to leave, or they would leave. It had happened before. He preferred to brave the semi-darkness a few days a year and forgo the stress of living with other people to the relative safety of the city’s bustle and bright lights.

  Instead, Wyatt had an apartment in Lynnwood, 16 miles north of Seattle, which he had inherited from his aunt Tallulah Sinclair, his father’s sister, along with Benson and Hedges. Aunt Tallie had always liked him and she had bought a house east of Bellingham, in Deming, around the time Wyatt dropped out of college. She had given him the apartment and left him her cats and she visited two or three times a year, usually during the holidays and in the summer. Wyatt liked his apartment, but it was technically still Aunt Tallie’s apartment, which meant that it cost him very little to stay there, otherwise he might have thought about moving somewhere with more florescent lighting. Somewhere with 24-hour grocery stores and pretentious hipster coffee bars.

  Somewhere without so much space.

  There were stretches of road on his way home without any street lights at all. Wyatt had seen some very strange, very frightening things on his way home from work, especially the closer it got to winter when the sun set earlier. He always drove through those places with his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly, his pulse racing a little faster, his eyes straight ahead. If he caught movement out the corner of his eye, he did not look to see what it was. He didn’t want to kno
w.

  On his way home that night there were things pacing him in the dark. He caught flashes of movement in the grass and bushes and his instinct was to look. There was something there and it was so hard to ignore the impulse of his eyes to flick that way. Just a glance. It would be an owl or a coyote or someone’s stray dog, he told himself.

  “You know better than that,” Wyatt muttered, staring straight ahead at the center line. “It’s not a dog. Or if it is a dog, it’s some kind of monster dog the size of a hippo with glowing eyes and two heads. Don’t you dare look.”

  And he didn’t look, but only because he had so much practice at not looking. He was a pro at not looking at things.

  Up ahead there was a sign with flashing lights blocking the road. ROAD CLOSED, it shouted. Wyatt came to a stop and stared, a little bubble of panic beginning to rise in his chest. Before it could become full-fledged panic, he noticed another sign, smaller and off to the right. DIVERSION, it said, with an arrow.

  He had no choice, he took the righthand turn and found himself in an unfamiliar residential area with poor lighting. It was not so late that people had all gone to bed yet, but it was dark enough that they had all gone inside their houses. A few porch lights were on, but not many, and the streetlights were few and far between. There were many deep shadowy places in alleys and driveways between houses and along fence lines in the shrubbery. If he had been in a familiar part of town, Wyatt could have ignored it, but he had never been there before, and he had to keep an eye out for yellow signs with arrows pointing him back to the main highway. He was starting to panic a little despite himself as he followed the signs in a labyrinthian series of twists and turns and didn’t see anything he was familiar with. This was why he had a routine, and, with very few exceptions, he stuck to it. On a street that he knew, he could get away if something came after him because he had memorized all the possible escape routes, every side street and every alleyway. It had been a long time since a night creature had become aggressive enough to attack his car, but it had happened before. Sometimes they became enraged and murderous if they knew that he could see them.