Night People

by J L Aarne

  Wyatt looked down at his sandwich sitting on a napkin in front of him with only a single bite out of it and he wasn’t hungry either. “So, what’s the truth?”

  “The truth is, if it exists, it’s a big, terrifying, godlike creature with more power than most of us have ever seen or will ever see in our lifetimes,” Silas said. “The belief among our kind is that it’s trapped beneath the crust of the earth. That it sleeps there.”

  “And what would happen if it woke up?” Wyatt asked.

  Silas tapped his fingertips on the tabletop and sighed. “The world would probably end,” he said. “Not because the thing hates us or hates the world or even has any real intention of destroying it, but because it can’t help it. It would tear the world apart just to break free.”

  “And the black-eyed things and the fleshgaits?” Wyatt asked.

  “I told you, they’re drawn to power, so yes, they would gather around something like the serpent,” Silas said. “They would serve it if they could because it would make them promises. It would tempt them.”

  “So, could the appearance of these things be because of—?”

  “I don’t know,” Silas cut him off. “I don’t know a lot for sure right now. I’d like to know who you’ve been talking to, though.”

  “It’s not important,” Wyatt said.

  “Look, I know you’ve been surrounded by these creatures your entire life, so I’m going to assume you’re on friendly terms with one or two of them, despite the fact you’ve always thought they were hallucinations,” Silas said. “I’m not going to kill it if you tell me. I just want to talk to it.”

  Wyatt considered it for a minute and he could see Silas’s point, but he could also see in his mind quite clearly, Silas turning over Wyatt’s bed and bringing his great monster-killing sword down on Thorn. He knew that Silas was friendly with some of the night creatures, like Herschel and Ned, like the gnomes, but Thorn was different. Thorn didn’t venture out from beneath the bed, he was solitary and reclusive, and it had taken years for him to even speak to Wyatt. Wyatt wasn’t sure what exactly Thorn even was, he had always just thought of him as the monster under his bed without giving a lot of thought to what kind of monster he might be. He had been there in his parents’ house when Wyatt was a child, then later during Wyatt’s brief attempt at college life, and now he lived in Aunt Tallie’s apartment beneath Wyatt’s queen-sized bed, and it had rarely occurred to him to wonder about it. The truth was, while Wyatt trusted Silas with his own life, he could not be sure yet if he should trust him with anyone else’s.

  When Wyatt didn’t say anything for a while, Silas gave up. “All right don’t tell me,” he said. He took a napkin from the holder and wiped his fingers. “Well, I said we needed to talk, so—”

  “You said it was time,” Wyatt said.

  “Yeah. All I wanted to say was, you know enough now to make a decision,” Silas said. When Wyatt opened his mouth to ask him what he meant, Silas held up a hand for him to be quiet. “A choice. You have a choice. You can take what you know and go on being exactly the way you are. Afraid a lot of the time, maybe a little less afraid than you were, but just some guy who works eight to four five days a week at a truck stop diner. Before you get all offended about it, let me say there is nothing wrong with that if that’s what you decide to do.”

  “I’m not offended,” Wyatt said. He didn’t say it loudly though because Silas seemed like he didn’t want to be interrupted.

  “I can’t keep on protecting you all the time,” Silas said. “That’s not what I do. I’m not a bodyguard, and even if I was, you couldn’t afford me. I like you, I don’t mind hanging out with you, I even enjoy it, but… But I thought you’d want more. I thought it would naturally just lead that way, but it hasn’t.”

  “Lead what way?” Wyatt asked. The way Silas talked, he wondered if he thought their friendship had been moving toward something else. Had Wyatt totally misread him, and Silas thought they had been working up to something intimate? The idea made his eyes want to cross. “Wait… What are we talking about? Is this… This isn’t some kind of relationship talk, is it? Because that—”

  “No,” Silas said. He did not appear to be amused, disgusted or surprised by the idea. It was simply a fact. “No, that’s not what this is about.”

  “Okay,” Wyatt said.

  “Your other option is to learn. I can teach you and you can be something else. There are nearly eight billion people on the planet and maybe two percent of them are like you. You can be more. You can become something that none of them can ever be, no matter how much they might wish it.”

  “Like you, you mean,” Wyatt said.

  “Don’t compare yourself to me, okay?” Silas said. “This isn’t a competition. There is no mold. If you’re not like me, that doesn’t make you wrong in some way. You’re you, however you choose to be. Your strengths aren’t mine, my strengths aren’t yours. Stop looking at it like I’m asking you to be me. That’s not what’s happening. You have a gift—or a curse—you can see it either way. What I’m saying is, it’s time to choose. I can’t go on watching over you forever and until you choose, there are some things I’m not going to tell you. They would only scare you.”

  Wyatt stared down at the tabletop and couldn’t help feeling embarrassed. Silas wasn’t trying to humiliate him, but the conversation had taken a weird turn that left Wyatt feeling like a teenage loser being told he had to clean himself up and go get a job. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “For…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems like I should be.”

  Silas huffed a soft laugh and slid out of the booth where they were sitting. “Don’t be sorry. Nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “Just figure it out. When you do, you can come find me.”

  Wyatt looked up at him. “What if I… you know, don’t want to? Want to learn, I mean?”

  Silas threw a ten-dollar bill down on the table to pay for his soup and his coffee. “Then I suppose I’ll see you around.”

  Or not. That was what he really meant. If Wyatt decided that he didn’t want to learn what Silas could teach him, Silas was finished with him; that was what he was saying.

  Wyatt didn’t know how he felt about the ultimatum Silas was implying, but he suspected once he figured it out, he might be rather angry with him. He had thought they were friends. He hadn’t realized that Silas saw their friendship as contingent upon Wyatt taking up the sword like he had. Then again, Silas had warned him. He had said it himself; he didn’t have many friends. Maybe that was because his friendship came with conditions.

  When he really thought about it, were they friends? There was a lot he didn’t know about Silas that he should know if they were friends but didn’t. He knew Silas lived close to him, but he had never visited him at his home. Silas visited Wyatt when they hung out, but Wyatt did not go over to Silas’s place, crash on his sofa and watch TV there. He couldn’t even remember his address. Silas had to work somewhere because it didn’t seem like monster hunting had any potential to double as a lucrative business, and Silas only killed the monsters sometimes. Only when they were a threat. Otherwise, he was sort of chummy with them. Wyatt had no idea where he worked or what he did for a living. He didn’t know if Silas had a day job or if he worked nights. It seemed more likely that he worked days only because Wyatt had seen him mostly at night and he had seen him sometimes several nights in a row after they first met. On those nights, he had never left using the excuse that he had to work. When you met someone, one of the first things you asked them, or they ask you, was, “What do you do?” Right after their name, that was the very first thing. Wyatt had never asked Silas that question. It hadn’t come up. Silas had never volunteered the information.

  When he thought about it, he didn’t know much about Silas at all.

  He remembered Dr. Graham’s concern about how quickly he had become attached to Silas. He had tried to dismiss her worries, but he’d worried about it himself
because it was strange, but then he had ignored it. It had been nice having someone around who was like him. Someone who believed him. He didn’t have to watch what he said or guard himself around Silas. Wyatt could admit, if only to himself, that the temptation of that friendship had overridden his caution and common sense. When it came to Silas, he knew better, but he was so damn tired of being alone.

  He sat at the table after Silas walked out of the diner for several minutes, thinking. Then he got up, threw his uneaten sandwich in the trash and bussed the table.

  Wyatt left work on time that evening, well before dark, but it wouldn’t have made much difference to him if it had been pitch black outside because his mind was elsewhere. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Silas had said. Not only his unspoken ultimatum, but the entire conversation. It played on a loop in his mind and he dissected it piece by piece. The fleshgaits and black-eyed children were drawn to chaos and power, but he still didn’t understand if the Midgard Serpent was real or myth and Silas’s explanation hadn’t made that any clearer. If it was real, what did that even mean? Was it stirring? Was that why the black-eyed kids had become so bold that they were now showing themselves in broad daylight? Or maybe they weren’t like other night creatures; hurt by the light or unseen in it. That girl at the pizzeria had come after Wyatt in the middle of the day. The sun hadn’t frightened, injured or deterred her.

  Had she looked like an ordinary little girl to everyone else?

  If the Midgard Serpent was real and it was stirring, the fleshgaits and black-eyed children would be out there in the world getting restless everywhere, not just in Wyatt’s little corner of Washington. It was a snake that could wrap around the entire world; it was a big world.

  The lights were on in his apartment when Wyatt got home, so he knew right away someone had been there. The door was locked, nothing was broken, and at a glance it didn’t appear that anything had been taken, but there was something waiting for him on the coffee table. A long sword with a sweeping hilt sat atop an old newspaper and a napkin between Wyatt’s dirty coffee cup from that morning and the TV remote control. The sweeping hilt was made up of a complex tangle of snakes, the crosspiece was designed to resemble a branch, and the pommel was shaped like an apple. The symbolism was hard to miss, even for someone as uninterested in religious allegory as Wyatt. It was beautiful, but it looked like something that belonged in a museum exhibition about 17th century Spain. It did not belong on Wyatt’s cluttered coffee table.

  He took his phone out of his pocket, intending to call Silas and demand an explanation, but it rang before he got the chance. It was his sister.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey. So, I know you’re not interested because… well, because,” Kat said. “But Mom and Dad wanted me to ask you anyway if you want to go to their place for dinner.”

  “Tonight?” Wyatt asked. He was still staring at the sword.

  “Yeah. They just thought dinner, you know? Together. It’ll be nice.”

  And they probably hadn’t asked her to invite him because his mother could have called and asked him herself. Kat was inviting him because they had assumed he wouldn’t come.

  “What time?” he asked.

  “Really? You’ll come?”

  “Yeah, Kat. What time?”

  “Mom said around seven. I know it’ll be dark,” she added apologetically. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. They’ll understand.”

  Of course, they would understand. Their parents had been understanding all his life. He doubted if any of them, Kat included, expected to see him at dinner. “All right. I’ll see you at seven,” Wyatt said.

  “What?” Kat said. “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously.”

  “Awesome. Mom will be so happy. Hey, but look… don’t take this wrong, okay? But if you’re just trying to be brave or something, don’t do that. Don’t do it and then freak out, okay? I’m sorry. I really am, but Dad’s been kind of strange. I think something happened when they were camping. Mom’s… I don’t know if she could take it tonight. I’m sorry, please don’t be pissed at me, I just don’t—”

  “Kat, I’m coming to dinner. I won’t freak out, I promise,” Wyatt said. “I gotta go.”

  “Oh. Okay,” she said. “I guess I’ll see you at dinner.”

  “See you then,” Wyatt confirmed.

  He put his phone back in his pocket and continued to stare at the sword for a few seconds before he turned his back on it and went to feed the cats and get ready for dinner.

  Lorrie and Aaron Sinclair’s home was a one-story, three-bedroom house that had been built sometime in the late 50s. When Wyatt and Kat were little, there had been an ugly orange, brown and gold shag carpet in the big living room and Wyatt still expected it to be there sometimes when he visited, though his father had ripped it out and replaced it with a dark blue wool carpet the year Kat went off to college. The house where Wyatt and Kat had grown up wasn’t a big house, but their mother had always kept it nice. Even while working full-time and raising two children, she had always found time to cook and clean the bathroom and weed the garden, and it was only much later that Wyatt had come to understand what an amazing woman his mother was. She had taken him to his therapy and she had dragged their dad to school conferences and drove Kat to piano lessons and cheerleader practice. She never seemed exhausted, and he had rarely seen her sad or angry.

  Wyatt had never seen her look quite like she did that night when she greeted him at the door. When she opened the door, she smiled at him, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She looked tired and afraid and like the last thing in the world she wanted to do was host a dinner party. Even a small one for the four of them.

  Wyatt had brought her flowers (chrysanthemums, her favorite) and she took them with a soft, sad look that didn’t belong on her face. “Thank you, dear,” she said. “How are you? I know it’s dark. I was so surprised when Kat told me you were coming. I hope you’re all right.”

  She was babbling. Words falling over each other in a rush.

  “I’m fine,” Wyatt said. It was truer than it would have been a month or even a week earlier. “Mom are you okay?”

  That weird smile again. She stepped back to let him inside. “Oh, I’m fine, too. Don’t worry about me. It’s just—” She hesitated and closed the door behind him as she took a moment to gather herself. “It’s your father. He’s been a little different is all. I’m sure it’s nothing. He’s been through a trauma, he’ll be back to his old self soon. You know me, I worry.”

  Wyatt did know her, and she did worry, that was true. Lorrie was the type of person who worried about a thing before it had even become a problem. She seemed to feel that it made her prepared, which he supposed in a way it did, but it could also be very frustrating when nothing bad was happening and she couldn’t relax because she was too busy preemptively worrying that something was going to go horribly wrong. It could make it difficult to enjoy things sometimes.

  This seemed different though. For one thing, the catastrophe (the stroke) had already happened and Aaron had survived it and, from all Wyatt had heard, was still leading a normal life. This was the point where Lorrie would usually let her guard down a little because the worst had happened, it was over. Instead she seemed more worried and afraid standing there in the doorway than Wyatt remembered her being at the hospital the night it happened.

  “What do you mean, he’s a little different?” Wyatt asked.

  He hoped that by “different” she wasn’t concealing the fact that his father had turned abusive or violent. He had heard that people sometimes did if the trauma to their brain affected their personality or caused symptoms of dementia. He had heard a lot of things after his father had his stroke though, not all of it to be believed. He loved his parents, and while his mother was a strong person, he also knew that she was both proud and unlikely to fight back if his father ever did hit her. Wyatt hoped that she wasn’t covering up for something like that; he was sure it would break
his heart to find out if she was.

  “Nothing, honey. He just says strange things sometimes and he… But the doctor says that’s normal. That it can happen, and he’ll probably stop it eventually.”

  Wyatt walked with her into the kitchen where the smell of simmering food washed over them. Spices and meat and heat from the fire. Lorrie had made enchiladas and they were still warming in the oven. There were dishes stacked up with a bundle of forks and knives sitting on top ready for the table to be set. The paper napkins were the ones from Thanksgiving with turkeys and cartoon pilgrims printed on them. Lorrie put the flowers in water and set them on the counter. On the stovetop, the kettle began to whistle, and she removed it an took down two cups from the cabinet above the sink.

  “It’s strange though,” she said.

  “What is?” Wyatt asked. He sat on a tall stool at the island counter across from her.

  When she set a cup of hot water in front of him and offered the container she kept teabags in, he took an Earl Gray. His mother didn’t drink coffee, but she always had tea ready. Wyatt and Kat had never developed much taste for coffee either.

  “It’s strange because when he first came home, your father seemed almost normal,” she said. She took a lemon green tea for herself and dipped it in the water. “A little slower, you know, because he was still recovering. I guess he still is. I just didn’t know it was going to be like this.”

  “He doesn’t seem normal anymore?” Wyatt asked. It seemed like such an odd thing for her to say. “Like how?”

  “Like yesterday: I brought him his lunch. A sandwich and soup. It’s what he always has for lunch. Except he leans over and starts lapping at it like a… like a dog or something. I gave him a spoon, it was right there, but he didn’t even pick it up. I told him, I said, Aaron, why don’t you use the spoon? Laughing a little because, well, I don’t know, I thought he was messing around. It didn’t seem like his sort of joke, but your father’s always had a strange sense of humor. He ignored me like I hadn’t said anything, kept on lapping at his soup, getting it all over the table. I put my hand on his arm and he…”