Night People

by J L Aarne

  Silas didn’t say anything for a few seconds, but then he said, “You are Wyatt in this scenario, you know that right?”

  “You’re Wyatt,” Wyatt muttered belligerently.

  Silas snorted. “Okay, whatever. We’ll get one Hawaiian pizza and one pepperoni with extra cheese.”

  “You’re a pizza,” Wyatt said. He was pouting, and he recognized that, but it did not mean he knew how to stop it.

  “Oh, yeah, I know,” Silas said. “Here I am, ladies and gentlemen, the world’s only amazing sentient pizza. I am Pizza Guy. Put me in a bowtie and I’m Bill Nye the Pizza Guy.”

  “I… what?” Wyatt said, staring at him.

  “Just tell me what you think about that stuff,” Silas said. “While I will admit that I am not the safest person to be standing next to when the bullets start flying, I don’t put you in the line of fire on purpose. Do you still think they’re delusions? Because if you do, you must think I’m a real sonofabitch.”

  “I don’t!” Wyatt said quickly. “Really, I don’t think that. I don’t. Don’t be mad, Silas.”

  “Depends,” Silas said. “Did I slip LSD in your Kool-Aid or what?”

  “I… don’t think so,” Wyatt said.

  “So, you’re not delusional?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, good. I was starting to think I hadn’t made any progress at all.”

  Wyatt puzzled that over for a few minutes before they reached the pizza restaurant. What did Silas mean by “progress” anyway? What kind of progress and why was he trying to make any in the first place?

  “I don’t understand you,” Wyatt muttered. He was starting to think that he never would understand Silas. He had never met anyone like him and, while Dr. Graham hadn’t been right about everything, she was right about that; the speed of their developing friendship was odd. For two people who had never met before a couple of weeks ago, they were seeing an awful lot of each other now.

  “I know, isn’t it great?” Silas asked as he got out of the truck.

  “No,” Wyatt said.

  Silas closed the door on him and walked into the restaurant. For about a minute, Wyatt was fine stewing in the loud silence and his own louder thoughts. Then he couldn’t stand it anymore and reached over to turn the key Silas had left in the ignition so that he could listen to the radio. There was a horrible talk show on where a guy with a donkey laugh and a woman with a nasally voice talked about gun rights and the president and immigration and Russia and a lot of other things that didn’t seem at all connected. He switched it to something else. Pink Floyd was on the next station and he let out a sigh of relief. Just as he relaxed back in his seat to listen and wait for Silas, there was a tap at his window.

  He glanced up and saw a young girl, about twelve or thirteen years old, standing there beside the truck. She wore a hoodie sweatshirt with the hood up and stood so close to the side of the car that her hair brushed the window, but she wasn’t looking through the window at him. Her head was down like she was staring at her own feet, which he thought was strange because she was obviously the one who had knocked; her knuckles still rested against the glass.

  “Will you let me in?” the girl asked.

  Her voice was flat, without inflection. It took Wyatt a second to realize she had asked him a question. “I don’t think I should. This isn’t my truck,” he said. “I’m just waiting for someone.”

  “I know. Let me in, I need a ride,” the girl said.

  She still didn’t look up. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “You are going to let me in,” she said. She lifted her hand away from the glass and brought it back down with a thud.

  “Nope,” Wyatt said, becoming annoyed as well as anxious. “Nope, I’m not. Go call your mom or… whoever. Go away.”

  The girl lifted her head, and her hair and the hood fell back from her face. She stared through the glass at him and Wyatt felt the bottom fall out of his stomach. Her eyes were pure black. There were no whites, no irises, just glossy black orbs like polished chunks of glass. There was nothing in those eyes either, they were utterly alien. The girl (the creature) appeared human, but it wasn’t human. It looked at him the way a lizard would have looked at him; without empathy or recognition, without the simple kinship that passed between two members of a species. To this girl, Wyatt was other; he was at best something in her path, at worst something to be devoured.

  He jerked back from the door and slapped at the lock. The door was already locked but he hit it again anyway. Then the girl-creature began to smile slowly, and he remembered the other door on the driver’s side. The door that was almost certainly not locked.

  He twisted around, hit that lock and felt slightly better.

  “Let me in. I need a ride,” the girl said. She hit the window again. “You are going to give me a ride.”

  “No. No, I’m not. I’m one hundred million billion percent sure I am not going to do that,” Wyatt said. His voice sounded soft and dry in his own ears, but the girl-thing heard him.

  She cocked her head in a distinctly un-humanlike way. The smile, a big rictus of a grin that split her face right down the middle, never slipped from her face. “Yes, you are. You are going to let me in. You are going to give me a ride. I need a ride.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Wyatt said, voice slightly more forceful than a whisper. “Go away. I’ll call for help.”

  He didn’t have his phone and Silas had taken his with him. Dr. Graham got very cross when a patient’s cell phone went off during a session, so Wyatt almost always left his at home when he went to see her. A habit that he was rapidly beginning to regret. Except who did one call in the event of a creepy, black-eyed hitchhiker? He had a feeling the police would only laugh at him. Silas was just inside the pizza parlor though. If he had his phone, he could have called Silas.

  “I’ll scream,” Wyatt said.

  The girl raised her hand and brought it down on the glass, that time hard enough that Wyatt felt the truck shake a little.

  “Silas! Silas, help!” he screamed.

  He’d had enough. He didn’t know what was going on, but he had almost no interest in finding out, he just wanted the scary little bitch to go away and leave him alone. It wasn’t dignified, it didn’t make much sense and it likely called his masculinity into serious question, but he couldn’t have cared less.

  “Silas! Silas, help me!” He peered through the windshield, trying to convince himself that he saw Silas coming. Silas was on his way. On his way with sword in hand, maybe. “Silas!”

  “Silas!” the girl mocked. “Silas! Oh, Silas, help me! Save me!”

  Wyatt ignored her though, because Silas was coming. He could see him, and he was almost to the door, two pizza boxes stacked together in one hand, the other before him to push the glass door open.

  “Silas! Do something!” Wyatt shouted. He banged on the windshield to get his attention and pointed toward the girl. “Silas!”

  The girl didn’t run away. She didn’t seem frightened at all. She turned to regard Silas with the same dispassionate lizard stare she had used on Wyatt.

  Instead of screaming like a scared little sissy, Silas stopped in front of the truck, set the pizzas down on the hood and reached inside his coat. “Get the fuck away from my truck,” he said.

  The girl went on staring at him for a moment. Then she asked, in that same creepy, flat voice, “Can you give me a ride?”

  “No,” Silas said.

  Wyatt didn’t know if Silas actually had a gun or any kind of weapon under his coat, but he had to admit that it was not impossible. The man liked guns. And knives. And swords. Well, and pretty much anything with the potential to poke fatal holes in people (and other critters).

  What Silas removed from inside his coat was a long, narrow dagger. He held it in one hand with the blade flat against his palm and when he moved, Wyatt thought for a moment that he had stabbed the girl with it. He rushed to the window to look out, his face pressed to
the glass. Silas moved so fast and with such purpose, Wyatt expected to see blood.

  Instead, he saw Silas seize the black-eyed girl by the hair, yank her head back and press the tip of the dagger to her rosy cheek just below the hollow of one shiny black eye.

  “Go back where you came from and the one who sent you that I’m coming,” Silas said. He spoke so low that it was hard for Wyatt to make out what he said. “Now, go away or I’ll take your eyes out right here. How would you like to die in the parking lot of Happy Hal’s Pizzeria? My, wouldn’t that be humiliating?”

  The girl drew her lips back from her teeth in that horrible wide smile, but she looked more like a scared dog than a laughing child now. “You’re all going to die,” she told Silas.

  Silas took the news of everyone’s impending demise without even a blink. He seemed unimpressed by her threat and, rather than afraid as Wyatt was, he got angry.

  He let the girl go with a sharp flicking motion of his wrist, propelling her away from himself as he released her hair. “Bye-bye, now,” he said.

  The girl pulled her hood back up and calmly looked from Silas to Wyatt and back. “You’re all going to die,” she told Silas again.

  “Yeah, I heard you the first time,” Silas said. He put the dagger back in his coat and tugged it down, smoothing the material to perfectly conceal the weapon.

  The girl tilted her head to one side, the gesture so much like that of a carrion bird eyeing a fresh corpse that it made Wyatt’s skin prickle. Then she turned and walked away. Silas watched her until she had crossed the street at the crosswalk before he got their pizzas off the hood of the truck and went around to the driver’s side.

  He knocked on the window and Wyatt remembered he’d locked the door and stretched out across the seat to pull the lock up. Silas got in and passed the pizza boxes to him.

  “What was that?” Wyatt asked. He twisted around to look out the back window. He could still make out the figure of a girl walking down the sidewalk. “That was not a girl. It looked like one, but it wasn’t. What the hell was that?”

  “A black-eyed child,” Silas said. He started the truck and turned to look out the same window as Wyatt as he backed out of the parking space. “They’re not really children, they just look like them. Sometimes like adults, but not as much. People are more likely to fall for the ruse if it’s wearing the face of a cute little boy or girl. A cute little boy or girl that just needs your help. That just needs a ride home. That just needs to come inside out of the rain and borrow your phone.”

  Wyatt shivered. He could easily imagine what Silas described. “Ew.”

  “Usually they come in pairs. One like her and one a little younger looking,” Silas said. He drove toward Wyatt’s building, taking a right, and glanced at him. “There’s probably another one around here somewhere.”

  “Okay, well let’s get the hell out of here then,” Wyatt said.

  “We’re going,” Silas said. He smiled a little and reached over with one hand to open the pizza box on top and take a slice. “She really scared you.”

  “Yeah, obviously, and you’re laughing at me for it, but I don’t care,” Wyatt said.

  “I’m not laughing at you.”

  “You’re smiling. Laughing on the inside though, I bet.”

  “Nope.”

  “Whatever.”

  Silas drove in silence for a few minutes, eating his pizza and not saying anything while Wyatt mulled it over.

  “What did you mean when you said, ‘the one who sent you’? Someone sends these things? Why?”

  “I don’t know if sends is really what they do,” Silas said. “It’s more of a sending-summoning combo. The fleshgaits and the black-eyed people are drawn to chaos and violence. To powerful evil. They appear in larger numbers when something like that is around, but there hasn’t been anything like that around in a long time. Even then, fleshgaits don’t usually come into cities. You saw what happens to them in the light. But maybe I’m wrong. We’ve only seen two—one of each. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, not some big, bad ancient evil.”

  ‘Powerful evil’ sounded to Wyatt like a good reason to pack his bags and go on vacation. No matter what Silas said about what he was, Wyatt didn’t feel like a guardian of anything. He was terrified of everything, how was he supposed to be anything like Silas? He needed to be protected just like everyone else. So what if he could see the things? All that meant was that he would be able to look into the face of the thing that was eating him while he died horribly.

  “Silas, I don’t think I can do this,” Wyatt said.

  Silas finished his slice of pizza and put the crust back in the box. “Do what?”

  “This,” Wyatt said. “Protect people from the things in the dark like you. I’m not you, I’m me and I’m… scared.”

  Silas nodded. “Weren’t you scared before?”

  “Yeah, but… that’s different.”

  “Not really. You were scared before and you ran away and hid, and you’re scared now, and I guess you could still run away and hide. That’s what you’re doing, right? Trying to run away and hide?”

  “I’m useless, okay? I don’t know what you want from me.”

  Silas didn’t tell him what he wanted, but Wyatt hadn’t expected that he would. It wasn’t his style. Instead of trying to argue with him about it more, Wyatt slumped down in his seat and road in silence the rest of the way back to his apartment.

  When they arrived, Silas parked the truck and Wyatt got out with their pizzas and started up the walk. It was still daylight and would still be daylight for a couple of hours, so he didn’t even feel like he had to hurry up about it. As he was trying to get his keys out of his pocket and find the right key for his front door, it hit him all over again what had happened back at the pizza restaurant. He couldn’t get the image of the black-eyed girl’s ugly smile out of his head.

  He dropped the keys.

  Before he could try to decide how best to juggle two large pizzas while bending over without dropping either of them, Silas walked over and picked them up for him. “I’ll get it. Which key is it?” he asked.

  Wyatt stared at him mutely. The gratitude he felt was too intense for merely retrieving his keys. Sometimes it worked that way; Dr. Graham had explained to him several times in the past about inappropriate emotional responses and how he had them on occasion. Though Wyatt recognized this to be one of those occasions, he didn’t care. He hugged Silas. He had to do it one-armed as he was still carrying their food, but he managed it without spilling anything.

  Silas tensed for only a moment, surprised by the unexpected gesture. Then he patted Wyatt’s back. “You’ll be all right,” he said. He held up a plain silver key with a square top. “Is this the right key?”

  Wyatt let him go like Silas had burned him. He was embarrassed, more so because Silas didn’t seem to even mind or notice. He didn’t seem to care, which for some reason made it ten times more humiliating that it had happened at all.

  “That was mean,” Wyatt said. He reached over and snatched the keys out of Silas’s hand. He used one with a round top to unlock the door. “Mean and… and patronizing.”

  “Patronizing?” Silas repeated, following Wyatt into the apartment. “How was I being patronizing?”

  “You… You just were. I’m trying to thank you for saving me from… that girl thing and you just pat me like I’m a puppy,” Wyatt said. He went to the kitchen and set the pizzas down on the counter.

  “Is that what you were doing?” Silas asked. He followed Wyatt into the kitchen and leaned around him to flip open a box and take a slice of pizza. “You’d make a cute puppy, though. All twitchy with big blue eyes and an eager-to-please wag to your tail. I’d name you Max.”

  Wyatt blinked at him, thrown for a second. “What? That’s not my name.”

  Silas shrugged. “You’re not a puppy.” He took a bite of pizza and chewed. “And you’re welcome.”

  “For what?”

  “For saving you. A
gain.”

  “Hey, I…” Wyatt suspected that he was now being teased. Teasing was like patronizing crossed with taunting and he had always hated it. “Wow, I am so mad at you right now,” he said with a touch of wonder. Minutes before, he had been overwhelmed with gratitude, and now he couldn’t remember why. “Really just, I really want to… I am punching you in the face in my head right now. I’m picturing it.”

  “Yeah?” Silas asked, leaning one hip against the counter. He watched Wyatt while he ate, unconcerned by his anger and a little bit amused. “How’s that working out for you?”

  “I… I’m losing,” Wyatt said honestly. “Even in my mind I’m losing this fight. Why? Why am I losing?”

  Silas almost choked on his food as he started to laugh.

  Chapter 8

  Wyatt got his car back a couple days after the encounter with the black-eyed girl and Silas didn’t have to give him rides to and from work anymore. Wyatt didn’t see him for almost a week, and he kept it to himself, but he sometimes missed Silas driving him to work and back, awkward, brooding silences and all.

  Something was bothering Silas and Wyatt had a pretty good idea that it had to do with the thing in the park and the creepy black-eyed girl. It was Silas though, so it could be something else. Some other goes-bump-in-the-night creepy something else that he didn’t feel the need to tell Wyatt about because Wyatt, as he had pointed out himself on many occasions, was useless.

  Even Kat thought he was useless these days. One minute she was giving him a fantastic load of crap about how he was the bravest person she knew, the next she was calling him a baby and hanging up on him in his hour of need. Mixed signals for sure, and enough to make anyone wonder which was the truth. He thought he knew: in her frustration, she had broken just a little bit and told him the truth.

  He hadn’t heard from her since. He had almost called her, but he would be damned if he was going to be the one who extended the olive branch this time. He was still mad and not sure he was ready to forgive her.

  He had talked to his mother on the phone a couple of times, but they talked about his father and his recovery. He was not an old man, so he was expected to fully recover, and he was doing well, but the doctors were watching him closely. Kat never came up in the conversation at all.